MAYBE NATURE SHOULDN'T BE WORSHIPPED AFTER ALL by Dennis Prager

Maybe Nature Shouldn't be Worshipped After All
by Dennis Prager
Tue, Apr 7, 2020.

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A statement widely attributed to the great British thinker G. K. Chesterton describes the modern period as perfectly as any single idea can: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

One of these substitute gods has been nature.

Indeed, of all the false gods, nature is probably the most natural for people to worship. Every religion prior to the Bible had nature-gods — the sun, the moon, the sea, gods of fertility, gods of rain and so on.

That is why the farther Western society gets from biblical, i.e., Judeo-Christian, religions, the more nature is worshipped.

Everyone on the left and right cares about the environment. But caring about the environment is not the same as environmentalism. Environmentalism, for most of its adherents, is a secular religion. These people, many of whom refer to, and truly regard, the Earth as a goddess (Gaia, the name of the ancient Greek Earth goddess) worship the environment.

The man who, more than any other, started the modern environmentalist religion was James Lovelock, who developed the “Gaia hypothesis” in the 1970s. Almost 50 years later, in 2014, Lovelock told The Guardian, “Environmentalism has become a religion.”

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat described the 2009 James Cameron blockbuster film, “Avatar,” as “Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism, a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.” That equation of God with nature was a major reason for the film’s popularity.

Douthat, one of the only religious (as in believing in and practicing a religion) columnists at The New York Times, added, “The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs: a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,’ and a piping-hot apocalypse.”

When you ask atheists, as I have for decades, what they believe in, the most common answer is “science.” There was a young man, an atheist, at the gym where I work out, who responded, “Science!” (in place of “God bless you”) whenever someone sneezed. There is nothing higher than science for an atheist because the natural world is all there is. So, worship of the Earth, the environment or nature is almost inevitable in a secular world.

The Bible takes an entirely different view. As explained at length in my Bible commentary, “The Rational Bible,” the first verse of the Bible — “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth” — contains the most radical idea in history. It stated, for the first time in history, that God created nature and is not part of nature. It is one of the reasons I believe the first five books, the Torah, are God-given. No human beings 3,000 years ago in the late Bronze Age would have come up with an idea so opposed to the way the human mind naturally works — to regard gods as part of nature.

From the point of view of the secular, Gaia-worshipping world, Genesis gets even worse when, 27 verses later, God tells human beings to, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.”

Both instructions infuriate Earth-worshippers. Regarding being fruitful, they oppose people having more than one child, and many advocate having no children so as to have minimal human impact on Mother Earth. But the second part — ruling over nature — is what really angers them.

Maybe the coronavirus will awaken young people, who have been taught by nature-worshipping teachers and raised by nature-worshipping parents, to the idiocy of worshipping nature rather than subduing it. Nature, it turns out, is not our friend, let alone a god. If it were up to nature, we’d all be dead: Animals would eat us; weather would freeze us to death; disease would wipe out the rest of us. If we don’t subdue nature, nature will subdue us. It’s that simple.

Nature is beautiful and awe-inspiring. It’s also brutal and merciless. “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred Tennyson aptly describes it. Nature follows no moral rules and shows no compassion. The basic law of all biological life is “survival of the fittest,” while the basic law of Judaism and Christianity is the opposite: the survival of the weakest with the help of the fittest. Nature wants the weakest eaten by the strongest. Hospitals are as anti-natural an entity as exists.

Only human beings make hospitals. We do so not by worshipping nature but by subduing it.

If the COVID-19 virus destroys the foolish veneration of nature and leads more people, especially the young, to a new respect for the Judeo-Christian worldview, it might be the one silver lining in this catastrophe.

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

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SCIENCE DENIERS

This article that I have reproduced from The New York Post claims that it is exceedingly often that medical science claims are falsified to promote some headline-grabbing result and/or funding-grabbing result.  This article about fake science in the medical fields is surely not limited to this one area of study. And I am supposed to swallow the fake 'science' of global warming alarmists? I do not argue that there is more carbon in the atmosphere than before. I do not even argue that it is possible that there has been a slight warming of the globe over the past 100 years. I also do not argue that the globe could possibly warm more in the future. I do argue that this is going to be a calamity that will wipe out life on earth as we know it. Any nut who believes that is a science denier. It is often these same types of people who can't seem to understand that with the exception of some bacterium and/or other simple lifeforms - the animal world has two genders and that gender is not something that one can select with the same ease that one selects a major at their local university. Apparently the science of gender is also beyond the comprehension of college students who have studied as many colleges in America as well as 'religious zealots' who mistake The New York Times for some kind of Bible. One thing that is often true, the thing that political opponents will accuse conservatives of, is often the exact thing that they know they are guilty of. (Sorry to have ended that sentence with a preposition.)

The problem with this sentiment is that science is NEVER decided by consensus.  It is better served by an examination of reality. By this logic, it could be argued that Galileo and Einstein had personality disorders as their ideas disagreed with the scientific consensus of the day. 

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from the New York Post
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LIVING

Medical studies are almost always bogus

By Susannah Cahalan

May 6, 2017 | 1:04pm

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How many times have you encountered a study — on, say, weight loss — that trumpeted one fad, only to see another study discrediting it a week later? That’s because many medical studies are junk. It’s an open secret in the research community, and it even has a name: “the reproducibility crisis.” For any study to have legitimacy, it must be replicated, yet only half of medical studies celebrated in newspapers hold water under serious follow-up scrutiny — and about two-thirds of the “sexiest” cutting-edge reports, including the discovery of new genes linked to obesity or mental illness, are later “disconfirmed.” Though erring is a key part of the scientific process, this level of failure slows scientific progress, wastes time and resources and costs taxpayers excesses of $28 billion a year, writes NPR science correspondent Richard Harris in his book “Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions” (Basic Books). “When you read something, take it with a grain of salt,” Harris tells The Post. “Even the best science can be misleading, and often what you’re reading is not the best science. Take one particularly enraging example: For many years research on breast cancer was conducted on misidentified melanoma cells, which means that thousands of papers published in credible scientific journals were actually studying the wrong cancer. “It’s impossible to know how much this sloppy use of the wrong cells has set back research into breast cancer,” writes Harris. Another study claimed to have invented a blood test that could detect ovarian cancer — which would mean much earlier diagnosis. The research was hailed as a major breakthrough on morning shows and in newspapers. Further scrutiny, though, revealed the only reason the blood test “worked” was because the researchers tested the two batches on two separate days — all the women with ovarian cancer on one day, and without the disease the next. Instead of measuring the differences in the cancer, the blood test had, in fact, measured the day-to-day differences in the machine.

So why are so many tests bogus? Harris has some thoughts.

For one, science is hard. Everything from unconscious bias — the way researchers see their data through the rosy lens of their own theses — to the types of beaker they use or the bedding that they keep mice in can cloud results and derail reproducibility.

Then there is the funding issue. During the heyday of the late ’90s and early aughts, research funding increased until Congress decided to hold funding flat for the next decade, creating an atmosphere of intense, some would say unhealthy, competition among research scientists. Now only 17 percent of grants get funded (compared to a third three decades ago). Add this to the truly terrible job market for post-docs — only 21 percent land tenure track jobs — and there is a greater incentive to publish splashy counterintuitive studies, which have a higher likelihood of being wrong, writes Harris.

One effect of this “pressure to publish” situation is intentional data manipulation, where scientists cherry-pick the information that supports a hypothesis while ignoring the data that doesn’t — an all too common problem in academic research, writes Harris.

“There’s a constant scramble for research dollars. Promotions and tenure depend on making splashy discoveries. There are big rewards for being first, even if the work ultimately fails the test of time,” writes Harris..

This will only get worse if funding is cut further — something that seems inevitable under proposed federal tax cuts. “It only exacerbates the problems. With so many scientists fighting for a shrinking pool of money, cuts will only make all of these issues worse,” Harris says.

Luckily, there is a growing group of people working to expose the ugly side of how research is done. One of them is Stanford professor John Ioannidis, considered one of the heroes of the reproducibility movement. He’s written extensively on the topic, including a scathing paper titled “Why Most Published Scientific Research Findings Are False.”

He’s found, for example, out of tens of thousands of papers touting discoveries of specific genes linked to everything from depression to obesity, only 1.2 percent had truly positive results. Meanwhile, Dr. Ioannidis followed 49 studies that had been cited at least a thousand times — of which seven had been “flatly contradicted” by further research. This included one that claimed estrogen and progestin benefited women after hysterectomies “when in fact the drug combination increased the risk of heart disease and breast cancer.”

Other organizations like Retraction Watch, which tracks discredited studies in real time, and the Cochrane group, an independent network of researchers that pushes for evidence-based medicine, act as industry watchdogs. There is also an internal push for scientists to make their data public so it’s easier to police bad science.

The public can play a role, too. “If we curb our enthusiasm a bit,” Harris writes, “scientists will be less likely to run headlong after dubious ideas.”

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Your Food Diary For:

Sunday, May 7, 2017

BREAKFAST	Calories kcal	Carbs g	Fat g	Protein g	Sodium mg	Sugar g
Bagel With Cream Cheese, 2	800	116	24	26	1,560	8
Dannon - Fruit on the bottom strawberry	260	50	3	10	10	44
	1,060	166	27	36	1,570	52
L U N C H
Read - 3 Bean Salad	600	130	0	10	3,000	80
	600	130	0	10	3,000	80
D I N N E R
Melted Cheese Sandwich	500	50	49	25	1,136	7
	500	50	49	25	1,136	7
Totals	2,160	346	76	71	5,706	139
Your Daily Goal	2,804	350	93	141	2,300	105
Remaining	644	4	17	70	-3,406	-34
	Calories kcal	Carbs g	Fat g	Protein g	Sodium mg	Sugar g

       Your Exercise Diary for:

Sunday, May 7, 2017

Cardiovascular	Minutes	Calories Burned
6 mile urban hike	93	1,007
Daily Total / Goal	93 / 30	1,007 / 590
Weekly Total / Goal	444 / 210	5,071 / 4,130

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5 X 6 ≠ 30

It should be, in fact it is, a mathematical truism that 5 x 6 = 30. It turns out that it might be less true when one is speaking about six mini workouts versus one 30 minute workout. Even when the workout is nothing more exotic that walking about. I have claimed before that it made no difference whether one walked for 30 minutes or walked six times for five minutes each. The number of steps accumulated would be equal. The number of calories burned would be equal.  This is, of course, true. 

A study in the New York Times (which miraculously managed not to bash Donald Trump, or call half of Americans bigots, and/or tell me how wonderful Obamacare is) gave some evidence that it is actual beneficial to spread out the walking in smaller bursts multiple times during the day. I will accept this and simply try to do both. I will continue to take long walks, but I will be conscious that as often as possible I should get up and move about multiple times during the day. 

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Your Food Diary For:

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

BREAKFAST	Calories kcal	Carbs g	Fat g	Protein g	Sodium mg	Sugar g
Quaker - Instant Oatmeal- Maple	800	160	10	20	1,300	60
	800	160	10	20	1,300	60
L U N C H
MARIANO'S - HUGE SPINACH SALAD	1,000	0	0	0	0	0
	1,000	0	0	0	0	0
D I N N E R
Sweet Onion Chick Teryaki	840	94	26	52	1,980	14
DARK COCOA MELTING WAFERS	500	55	30	7	102	48
	1,340	149	56	59	2,082	62
S N A C K S
Protein Bar - MET-Rx, 1 bar	310	29	10	32	95	1
	310	29	10	32	95	1
Totals	3,450	338	76	111	3,477	123
Your Daily Goal	2,852	356	95	143	2,300	107
Remaining	-598	18	19	32	-1,177	-16
	Calories kcal	Carbs g	Fat g	Protein g	Sodium mg	Sugar g
	*You've earned 922 extra calories from exercise today

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       Your Exercise Diary for:

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Cardiovascular	Minutes	Calories Burned
Elliptical Trainer	99	959
Daily Total / Goal	99 / 30	959 / 590
Weekly Total / Goal	356 / 210	3,969 / 4,130

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from the New York Times

WELL | MOVE

Work. Walk 5 Minutes. Work.

Phys Ed

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS DEC. 28, 2016

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Stuck at your work desk? Standing up and walking around for five minutes every hour during the workday could lift your mood, combat lethargy without reducing focus and attention, and even dull hunger pangs, according to an instructive new study. The study, which also found that frequent, brief walking breaks were more effective at improving well-being than a single, longer walk before work, could provide the basis for a simple, realistic New Year’s exercise resolution for those of us bound to our desks all day. There is growing evidence, of course, that long bouts of uninterrupted sitting can have undesirable physical and emotional consequences. Studies have shown that sitting motionlessly reduces blood flow to the legs, increasing the risk for atherosclerosis, the buildup of dangerous plaques in the arteries. People who sit for more than eight or nine hours daily, which for many of us describes a typical workday, also are at heightened risk for diabetes, depression and obesity compared to people who move more often. In response, researchers and some bosses have proposed a variety of methods for helping people reduce their sitting time at work, including standing workstations and treadmill desks. But such options are cumbersome and pricey, making them impractical for many work situations. Some experts have worried, too, that if people are physically active at the office, they might subsequently become more tired, grumpy, distracted or hungry, any of which could have an undesirable effect on work performance and long-term health. So for the new study, which was published last month in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, researchers from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center, the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, and other institutions decided to test several methods of increasing movement among office workers. (The study was funded largely by Johnson & Johnson, with additional support from the Colorado Nutrition Obesity Research Center.) To start, the researchers invited 30 sedentary adult office workers to a university clinic to complete a battery of health tests and questionnaires. The researchers measured their heart rates and stress hormone levels and asked them to rank, on a numerical scale, their sense of how energetic or tired they felt, as well as how happy they were, and whether they were feeling puckish and longing for food or had little appetite just then. The volunteers also completed computerized games designed primarily to test their ability to concentrate and make decisions. Then, on three subsequent visits to the clinic, each volunteer simulated a six-hour workday. During one visit, the volunteers sat for the whole time with no interruptions, except for bathroom breaks. During another, they walked moderately for 30 minutes at the start of their experimental day, and then sat for the next five-and-a-half hours with no additional scheduled breaks. Finally, during a third visit, the volunteers sat for most of the six hours, but began each hour with five minutes of moderate walking, using treadmills at the clinic. At the start and end of each session, the researchers drew blood to check levels of stress hormones. And periodically throughout each day, they asked their volunteers to numerically rate their moods, energy, fatigue, and their appetites. The volunteers also repeated the computerized testing of their thinking skills at the close of each session. The researchers then analyzed the data. The numbers showed that on almost all measures, the subject’s ratings of how they were feeling rose when they did not sit for six uninterrupted hours. They said that they felt much more energetic throughout the day if they had been active, whether that activity was bunched into a single, longish walk at the start of the day or distributed into multiple, brief breaks. On other measures, though, the five-minute walks were more potent than the concentrated 30-minute version. When the workers rose most often, they reported greater happiness, less fatigue and considerably less craving for food than on either of the other days. Their feelings of vigor also tended to increase throughout the day, while they often had plateaued by early afternoon after walking only once in the morning.There were no differences on the scores on the cognitive tests, whether they sat all day or got up and moved. Stress hormones also remained steady during each visit. These results suggest that “even a little bit of activity, spread throughout the day, is a practical, easy way to improve well-being,” says Jack Groppel, a study author and co-founder of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute. He points out that the walking breaks did not cause people to feel more tired or hungry, but instead had the opposite effect. They also did not alter people’s ability to focus, so, in theory, should not affect productivity (for good or ill).This study, however, was small in scale, short-term and limited by its dependence on the volunteer’s perceptions of their responses to the experiment. But even so, “it’s clear that moving matters,” Dr. Groppel says. So set your 2017 appointment calendar, he suggests, to devote five minutes every hour to physical activity, whether you walk up and down a staircase, along a corridor or just pace around your office.

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THE 3500 CALORIE MYTH

This was part of an interesting article that I found on WebMD.com.  I actually had thought that the 3500 calorie rule was 'settled science'  (you know, like global warming....)

OK, I am absolutely not being serious here.... THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SETTLED SCIENCE.  Unless, your scientific beliefs are based on some kind of quasi religion, science is never settled. (If you think science can be settled, go back to your 9th grade general science textbook and look up how many planets there were back in the old days - a book published today will give a different answer.  SPOILER ALERT: Although the new settled science will list one planet less, no planets were destroyed by the Borg or Darth Vader's Death Star.) As new discoveries, are made, so-called settled science can become quite unsettled.  If anyone argues a scientific point and uses as their argument that the science is settled - you can be sure that you are talking to Al Gore or a left-wing college professor or someone equally ignorant. The most agreed upon scientific theories are born from research not self-important guru politicians or polls. The next time someone tries to prove a point advising you that 97% of scientists agree on anything - just know that you are talking to someone who does not know the first thing about science. Science is determined by hypothesis, and experimentation - not the editorial page of the New York Times. That is way more pontificating than necessary for today... Today, I am going to discuss something that I admit I did think was settled science - and like much of settled science - research has unsettled it.

NEWS FLASH....FROM WebMD (I have reproduced just the beginning of the article from their website)
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Do You Have to Cut 3,500 Calories to Lose a Pound?
The idea that dieters need to cut this many calories -- with diet, exercise or both -- to lose 1 pound of weight comes from an influential scientific paper published in 1958. Max Wishnofsky, MD, a doctor who lived in Brooklyn, N.Y., tried to sum up everything we knew about how calories are stored by the body. He concluded that when the body is in a steady caloric state -- meaning it isn’t fasting or starving -- extra calories will be stored as fat, and it would take 3,500 extra calories to create a pound of fat. In that same steady state, he also said it would take a deficit of 3,500 calories to lose a pound of weight. For decades, the “Wishnofsky Rule” has been math that determined dieters live by.

The trouble is that it’s wrong.

The 3,500-calorie rule doesn’t work because the body adjusts to weight loss. It quickly decreases the number of calories it needs to maintain its new, lighter size, says Corby Martin, PhD, director of the Ingestive Behavior Laboratory at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, LA. That means weight loss slows down over time. People who expect to drop a pound for every 3,500 calories they cut will soon become frustrated when the scale doesn’t cooperate.

Let’s say a dieter knows they need to eat 2,500 calories a day to maintain their current weight. But they want to slim down. So they decide to shave 500 calories off their daily intake. According to the Wishnofsky Rule, after about a week of doing that, they should lose a pound.

“For the first week or two, the 3,500 calorie-per-pound rule kind of works, roughly, but after the first couple of weeks it doesn’t work,” Martin says.

Here’s why: In 3 or 4 weeks, you need less food to maintain that new, svelter shape.

The good news is that researchers have been working hard to update Wishnofsky’s formula. There are new calculators, like the Body Weight Planner available from the NIH and the Weight Loss Predictor from Pennington. Give them a few key details, like your sex, age, weight, height, activity level, and the date you want to hit your goal, and they’ll give you a more realistic daily calorie goal to get you there.

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In the next couple of days we are going to explore the BODY WEIGHT PLANNER from NIH as well as the WEIGHT LOSS PREDICTOR from Pennington.
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The studies that prove that 3500 calories do not always result in a net gain or loss remind me of a comment that I have heard Dennis Prager, radio host, columnist and book author, say many times on the radio.  "Ever since I attended college, I have been convinced that either “studies” confirm what common sense suggests or that they are mistaken."  Most of us already knew that the 3500 calorie rule could not have been exactly right.  Common sense should have told us, as so many of us already knew from our own experiences, that the 3500 calorie rule was simply was not completely true.
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Your Food Diary For:

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

BREAKFAST	Calories	Carbs	Fat	Protein	Sodium	Sugar
Safeway Eating Right - Granola Cereal, 1.0 cup	330	66	4	8	300	21
Malt O Meal - Honey Nut Scooters, 150 g	600	120	8	15	1,050	45
	930	186	11	23	1,350	66
L U N C H
American Cheese - Kraft Single Milk..mine, 2 slice (21g)	140	4	9	8	440	2
Eggs - Grade A Large, 3 egg (50g)	210	0	15	18	210	0
Kroger - Deli Sliced Ham, 3 slices	45	2	2	8	488	2
S. Rosen's - 100% Whole Wheat Bread, 1 slice	100	19	1	5	190	3
	495	25	27	39	1,328	7
D I N N E R
Doctor Kracker - Pumpkin Seed Cheddar Crisp Bread, 8 Piece	800	104	36	32	1,200	0
Campbells Home Style Soup - Italian Wedding Soup, 2.5 cup	250	33	6	15	1,025	10
	1,050	137	42	47	2,225	10
S N A C K S
ROBERTO - GRISSINI TORINESI (BREADSTICKS), 16 BREADSTICKS	140	22	3	4	280	0
the Fresh Market - Cranberry Oat Sweet & Savory Crisps, 40 -10 crisp	400	80	8	10	575	30
	540	102	11	14	855	30
Totals	3,015	450	91	122	5,758	113
Your Daily Goal	2,564	320	85	129	2,300	96
Remaining	-451	-129	-5	7	-3,457	-17
	Calories	Carbs	Fat	Protein	Sodium	Sugar
	*You've earned 634 extra calories from exercise today

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Your Exercise Diary for:

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Cardiovascular	Minutes	Calories Burned
MATRIX TREADMILL	75	730
MFP iOS calorie adjustment	N/A	-96
Daily Total / Goal	76 / 30	634 / 590
Weekly Total / Goal	261 / 210	4,739 / 4,130

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total calories consumed 3015 calories

total calories (75 minutes treadmill) 730 calories

total net calories 2285 calories

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fitbit day 124

14747 steps
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