Saturday Signal: sifting the signal from the noise of the Internet’s occultural cacophony.

Questions this week, both esoteric and secular – well, sort of.

Does Dr John Dee’s image need “rescuing”? Who knew film critic Roger Ebert cared anything for the I Ching, tarot, and “certified flywheel” Aleister Crowley? Is anyone really sympathetic toward “Jedis”?

Why is Creation – a film about the life of Charles Darwin – deemed “too controversial” for American audiences? How is this possible in 2009? Why would this ever seem doubtful?

• Jordan’s Stratford’s “How to Read Gnostic Texts” outlines the fundamentals for a comprehensive understanding of any period writing, especially of an esoteric nature. Take the time to read source texts. It’s essential.

• According to JFrater on Listverse.com, a recording of Aleister Crowley’s voice ranks fourth in a list of Top Ten Eerie Recordings, falling behind truly eerie recordings of the December 26th earthquake (#3), a missing cosmonaut (#2) and a 911 call on 9/11 (#1). All recordings are available for download.

• Mark Stevenson writes “2012 isn’t the end of the world, Mayans insist”  Can we believe them? Yes. I’m as much a fan of apocalypse mythos as the next gal, but seriously darlings, isn’t 2012 a bit much?

• Science shoots lasers at yoga masters and is somewhat surprised by the results in an article linked to by Mind Hacks‘ Vaughan in “Strung out on lasers“.Which is just kinda awesome.

That’s it for this week, kids.

Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, first published in 1986, was written to counter arguments made in favour of creationism by the eighteenth century theology William Paley’s Natural Theology, published in 1902.

Paley is perhaps best remembered today for his watchmaker analogy, intended as an argument in favour of the existence of an intelligent designer, or god. This was first seriously challenged by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection (the consequence of, or process by which “favourable” traits become prevalent and “unfavourable” traits become rarer), made well known in his Origin of the Species first published in 1859. Dawkins further decimates Paley’s theory, arguing instead for a “blind” watchmaker, as highly complex systems can be produced by a series of small, cumulative – yet naturally selected – steps, rather than relying on a supernatural designer.

If you walk up and down a pebbly beach, you will notice that the pebbles are not arranged at random. The smaller pebbles typically tend to be found in segregated zones running along the length of the beach, the larger ones in different zones or stripes. The pebbles have been sorted, arranged, selected. A tribe living near the shore might wonder at this evidence of sorting or arrangement in the world, and might develop a myth to account for it, perhaps attributing it to a Great Spirit in the sky with a tidy mind and a sense of order. We might give a superior smile at such a superstitious notion, and explain that the arranging was really done by the blind forces of physics, in this case the action of the waves. The waves have no purposes and no intentions, no tidy mind, no mind at all. They just energetically throw pebbles around, and big pebbles and small pebbles respond differently to this treatment so they end up at different levels of the beach. A small amount of order has come out of disorder, and no mind planned it.

Dawkins explains that, of course Continue reading »