lasxpirate, Why have Patience with 100% evil, recalcitrant criminals, who are determined to continue abusing children? Life is short, the criminals must be punished, why don't you understand simple questions in plain English? Are you illiterate, insane or evil?

There is, you may have noticed, a vast history of ideas from which we observe, well documented, scientifically proven failure & reject those ideas. Insanity is defined by repeating failed experiments while praying for different results & something leftists do. The scientific philosophy of common sense realism has no biases, you just accept the settled science.

I bring to bear on your claim that there is no single coherent theory of cultural evolution or transmission that has perfect predictive power over future contingencies the scientific fact that both failure & success can be observed, proven. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan is a cautionary tale about predictive hubris, bringing self fulfilling prophecy perilously close to self delusion, or cognitive dissonance & you display ALL the symptoms.

Who, even 100 years or so before the event, predicted the Protestant Reformation, (actually enlightened conservative people did) the abolition of slavery, (actually enlightened conservative people did) the Internet (did) or the discovery of DNA? (& did) Sleep on. I have an affinity with David Deutsch’s beginning of infinity in terms of human creativity because of enlightened, conservative, protesting Christianity & you have blind faith in the negative religion of communism.

Toni Lavis, I'd explain to you about false syllogisms but I KNOW that you are bright enough to grasp it & are a sociopsychopath. Suffice to say that i know that no reply might just mean that people are ignoring the inconvenient truth and hoping it will go away, which is what repeat offenders like you generally do when faced with evidence of their own insanity, but who seem at first to be harmless while ranting in public, until we realise that YOU are coming after our children.

Dear imacentristmoderate,

I think 579 is more correct in his or her definition of the use of the burqa than the explanation you have put forward. But then I can be easily led. After all, I only have degrees in anthropology, sociology and history.

Imacentristmoderate, thank you for quoting me with decibels added. The unadorned debate is still, at least in part, about better or worse predictors of cultural change. Phil introduced biology in a way I related to evolutionarily acquired attraction/avoidance mechanisms. A recent article by Massimo Pigliucci suggests that it might be time to dispense with the idea of ‘cultural evolution’ because change and adaptation in biological evolution, its analogical model, is problematically different in culture.

http://www.philosophersmag.com/index.php/footnotes-to-plato/83-the-trouble-with-cultural-evolution

While it might take thousands of generations in biology for a random phenotypical behaviour to occur that may subsequently spread successfully through a population, the problem that Pigliucci discusses (at the risk of over-simplification) is that predictability in culture cannot readily be referred to the same kind of theoretical and empirical constructs. Our sophisticated metacognitive capacity no doubt plays a crucial role in rate of change.

This question of relative predictability in biology and culture (1) supports the view that the Protestant Reformation is by no means a good predictive model for Islam (that, I take it, would be your view and that of some other contributors), but (2) makes it equally unwise to make unsupported categorical assertions about what processes of cultural change will or won’t impact on Islam.

I included a link in an earlier post to an article by Matt Ridley, who offers rational arguments that might be held to predict (pace Taleb) future change in the Islamic worldview. Although it’s of no particular relevance to the import of the article, Ridley is not a communist (neither, incidentally, am I), but a conservative peer in the British House of Lords.

imacentristmoderate,

There are a number of reasons why I haven't replied, first and foremost is that I'm waiting to see the depths of your ack of manners, the second is that my computer is down and I.m using my wife's one.
Her's has an old fashioned and tiresome 'qwerty' key board that I find 'qwerty' irksome to use.

There's no legal or constitutional requirement in Australia compelling anyone to speak English.

Language is very pragmatic. People use it to whatever effect they think useful.

In choosing to express oneself, in whatever manner one desires, to achieve a certain goal, is otherwise known as 'free speech' or 'freedom of expression'.

If I could say something in an exotic language with the deliberate intention of irritating the narrow minded and myopic likes of Phil Dye, then I probably would.

Phil Dye, a devout atheist, says he visited a Hillsong church service, for what reason exactly?

Was it his intent to look for orange elephants?

Is Mr Atheist secretly obsessed with religion? I find that almost quaint.

We might presume he attended the church service in order that he could look down his nose on the ignorant classes, the less informed, and less educated; to sit in Almighty judgement on anyone who might dare to think a little differently to himself.