151. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #185869 by Quine on May 28, 2008 at 10:33 pm

Yet again, txpiper shows us that we have not plumbed the depths of his misunderstanding:

... the current idea which is "waiting on that lucky mutation".

There is no "waiting" in the "current idea." This comes from the fallacy of direction in evolution. Each living being is simply going through its life, not waiting for something. It only gives the false impression of direction in retrospect.

I also notice that all our attempts to broaden the understanding of the nature of mutations have fallen on deaf ears.

152. 1968 Supreme Court case of Epperson v. Arkansas

Comment #185845 by Quine on May 28, 2008 at 7:49 pm

The calls to C-SPAN showed many of the same problems with general lack of knowledge that have popped up on the radio shows visited by Prof. Dawkins in the last couple of years. At this time RD is writing a new book presenting the evidence for the theory of evolution by natural selection which should give us a quick touchstone to answer many of these problems.

Perhaps we could find a university statistics department who would be interested in doing a comprehensive survey of what the public knows, does not know and actually thinks is true about all of this. If we had that data we would know the specific points that need to be addressed to move the public understanding of science along by the most targeted application of resources.

153. 1968 Supreme Court case of Epperson v. Arkansas

Comment #185824 by Quine on May 28, 2008 at 5:47 pm

Unfortunately, people like this can always defend their use of the term "Darwinism" by pointing out that atheists and "evolutionists" like Dawkins also say "Darwinism" when they're talking about Darwinian theory. It gives them cover.

Well, we can stop. I know some think it is pedantic, but again I must insist that vocabulary matters. There is no 'ism involved in the theory of evolution by natural selection. The "teachings" of Darwin have no special status other than what is demonstrably true. These days I try to use "Natural Selection" instead of just "evolution" to make it clear to everyone who is listening that this is the key point. I am no "Darwininist" just as I am no "Popperian" and correct anyone who mischaracterizes me as such.

154. We happy hooligans

Comment #185751 by Quine on May 28, 2008 at 12:36 pm

Thanks Colwyn. After watching that, all I can say is:

PZ v. Theologians ... Bring it.

155. Car dealership advert tells atheists to 'shut up'

Comment #185388 by Quine on May 27, 2008 at 5:43 pm

Don't worry, these yokels are out in the middle of nowhere (literally between Bakersfield and Barstow) and are too dumb to realize that a big slice of those religious Americans also believe in separation of church and state.

156. Mail-boat record 'proves Darwin stole his original ideas from a Welsh scientist'

Comment #184939 by Quine on May 26, 2008 at 1:17 pm

If I were going to comment about this I would note that it is too stupid to be subject to comment, but I won't do that because that would be a comment.

157. Probe lands on Mars, NASA says

Comment #184581 by Quine on May 25, 2008 at 7:09 pm

NASA: We on ur planet, sampling ur icecap.

158. A Tribute to Douglas Adams: Towel Day May 25th

Comment #184542 by Quine on May 25, 2008 at 4:29 pm

I've got my towel right here, and am watching the NASA Mars lander coverage on the web.

159. Repulsive but right

Comment #184530 by Quine on May 25, 2008 at 3:21 pm

Given permission, Prof. Dawkins should send Martin Kettle copies of letters received from clergy who have dropped their theistic delusion. It is too small a sample Martin Kettle is looking to for justification that Prof. Dawkins makes no progress among believers.

160. How Are Humans Unique?

Comment #184512 by Quine on May 25, 2008 at 2:28 pm

Hi Bullet,

You are young enough to remember what is was like to find out that there is no Santa; he is just a made up guy to help folks feel good and have a myth for a special kind of party. Every civilization of humans have also made up deities to make them feel good. It can also be a hard part of adult life to find out that the religion you were taught as a child is made up. If you were born in India you would now (probably) be wondering if the Hindu deities you believe, are real. In the modern world you have an advantage over your parents; you can look up and find the truth for yourself.

161. How Are Humans Unique?

Comment #184491 by Quine on May 25, 2008 at 1:25 pm

Bullet, I suggest you go read the Lying for Jesus thread (from the beginning), where you will find many others have already made your comments, and where you will be able to read the answers and get the links to the background sources.

162. Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?

Comment #184308 by Quine on May 24, 2008 at 1:06 pm

Hi, julianstirling, thanks for your interesting link in comment #184281. I have also remarked about the general confusion between "information entropy' and "physical entropy" especially as it has come up in discussions with creationists who try to use (but in fact misuse) the second law to prove that evolution by Natural Selection could not generate new information.

However, Lambert goes too far in his zeal on this when he states that there is no connection or overlap. There is overlap in special situations, and macro implications as shown in the famous work by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli circa 1980. This is now being used to design adiabatic logic in microprocessors to reduce the waste heat produced in information processing.

163. Five Things Humans No Longer Need

Comment #184191 by Quine on May 23, 2008 at 9:40 pm

King of NH, in prehistoric times you would not have lived much past 30, and so would have had perfectly adequate vision to pass on your genes long before.

164. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #184163 by Quine on May 23, 2008 at 8:07 pm

I hope those who need to read it, do read it.

165. Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?

Comment #184159 by Quine on May 23, 2008 at 7:57 pm

mordacious1, the article; your post was perfectly fine.

166. Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?

Comment #184147 by Quine on May 23, 2008 at 7:27 pm

Is there a falsifiable hypothesis in there somewhere?

167. 'Reverse Evolution' Discovered in Seattle Fish

Comment #183669 by Quine on May 22, 2008 at 1:03 pm

Thanks, mordacious1, the "evolution Natural Selection" edit in comment #183643 was for you.

Also, I am starting to complain about the "central dogma" phrase coined for biology by Francis Crick. This is so well woven into the textbooks that it will take a long time to get it moved down into the footnotes.

I would sum it up this way: "Dogma bad." Dogma is required belief that stands apart from criticism regardless of evidence. How do you teach students the "central dogma" and then turn around and also teach them that one of the greatest (if not defining) things about Science is that it has the dogma of no dogma?

168. 'Reverse Evolution' Discovered in Seattle Fish

Comment #183643 by Quine on May 22, 2008 at 12:07 pm

Creatures (on average) adapt to their environment.

"Creatures" is also a "really bad term" when used to refer to living beings that came from [Edit: evolution Natural Selection]. Harry Potter is a creature of J. K. Rowling, and there are viruses that have been 'created' in the lab, and so are truly creatures. I know that this is not an easy one to do anything about, but we can start to raise consciousness about the words we use.

169. Richard Dawkins lecture at ASU's Tempe Campus

Comment #183624 by Quine on May 22, 2008 at 11:39 am

Very well done, indeed. I especially liked the stress on the point that just because all things are not perfectly known, it doesn't make fairy tales any more reasonable.

170. Sun's properties not 'fine-tuned' for life

Comment #183611 by Quine on May 22, 2008 at 11:05 am

Well, isn't that special.

171. 'Reverse Evolution' Discovered in Seattle Fish

Comment #183550 by Quine on May 22, 2008 at 8:56 am

I agree with [Edit: rodviking,] Dax and Mike O'Risal. Because of the political situation, you can't ignore the impact of terms and phrases taken out of the scientific context and dropped into the public media. The public will hear "reverse evolution" and instantly get the impression that the must be a "forward" direction that was "reversed." We are struggling to get the public to have even a basic understanding of the true nature of evolution, and this does not help.

P.S. Does the average person ever think of his/her neighborhood in terms of a "phase space"?

172. The amazing intelligence of crows

Comment #183267 by Quine on May 21, 2008 at 5:13 pm

Lost parrot tells vet his name and address in this story.

173. In God's Name

Comment #183222 by Quine on May 21, 2008 at 2:23 pm

Kudos to the bird. That was some great shooting.

I would gladly pay crows (or even pigeons) to deter street preachers. (see bird intelligence)

174. In God's Name

Comment #183085 by Quine on May 21, 2008 at 11:15 am

If a school persisted, against evidence, in teaching children that the world was flat we would consider that, not only damaging the children, but also damaging the future of our society. Why is this not also the case for six day creation? I agree with EvidenceOnly; it is a crime against humanity to tech children things that are shown by real physical evidence to be false.

175. Lab agrees to test Shroud of Turin for new theory

Comment #183047 by Quine on May 21, 2008 at 9:19 am

I believe in cheeses. Many cheeses are wrapped in cloth shrouds during manufacture; we should be testing them too.

The Shroud of my Cheeses, Let Me Show You It!

(P.S. If you were making Swiss, you could end up with the shroud of holey cheeses.)

176. Edgar Mitchell ushers in the Next Epoch in Evolution

Comment #183026 by Quine on May 21, 2008 at 8:53 am

But, Wiener defined information as the negative of entropy, and that's wonderful but it didn't go far enough.

This misunderstanding comes up again and again in new age woo woo. Negative entropy can be measured in units of information, but the information itself is not negative entropy. In special cases, information is required to reverse the entropy increase in a specific system, but that same information could not be taken to a different system and used as energy.

177. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #182596 by Quine on May 20, 2008 at 3:35 pm

Al:

Come on, religion itself is the pinnacle of arrogance, ...

It is the arrogance of form without substance.

178. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #182558 by Quine on May 20, 2008 at 1:05 pm

The discussion into the rates of diversification in evolution we have been having has brought up some new thoughts. As I tried to explain to tx yesterday, having cells with a library of protein molecules ready to express based on sections of regulatory DNA means that small changes in those pieces of DNA have big impacts on the morphology of the resulting organism. This being the case, when did this start being the case?

The reason I ask this question is that the ToE would predict that there should be a visible transition in the fossil record from a time before this ability (to switch in and out existing proteins) to a subsequent time when this ability is common. Before it happens, organisms would have to evolve new proteins to make significant changes, so changes would be expected to be slow. But once the library is built up and the mechanism to do the choosing and timing of expression is there, we would expect to see a sudden (on the geologic scale) increase in diversity until the new options for ecological niches are populated.

Can anyone point me to work along this line?

179. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #182399 by Quine on May 20, 2008 at 12:19 am

Comment #182393 by MaxD

Quine,
How do you do that fancy linkin'?

It is just the HTML link as shown in the Comment Posting Guidelines, except that I add the font color tag to make it stand out so I can find them quickly when I am looking back for one.

The hardest trick is that the hyperlink auto-editing feature is going to mess it up the first time you submit the post, so I just copy the entire post before I submit it, and then immediately hit the edit and paste the original post back over the messed up one and then hit the submit again. A bit of a pain, but I am used to it now. (Edit:There are no links in this post, so I won't have to do that this time.)

---------
Edit: Okay, now that I posted this, I have gone back in with the edit button and changed the "HTML link" in the first line into a link to an HTML quick ref page. To do this, I inserted this string just before: <a href="http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/reference/article.php/3472851" target="_blank"><font color=blue><u>
and this one just after: </u></font></a>

If you write your posts in Word, or another editor, you can write yourself a macro that does all that for you so you don't have to keep typing all those tags.

--------
Edit²: This time I went back in and changed the "Comment Posting Guidelines" in the first line to a relative link by inserting the string: <a href="./commentNotes.html" target="_blank"><font color="#8080E0"><u>
before and then the closing string: </u></font></a> just after.

This is a relative link because the URL is ./commentNotes.html which is here in the RD.net relative to this page. I use a non standard color for this, again so I can easily find links to comments. I did this again to put in the link back to the comment by MaxD using the string: <a href="./articleComments,2394,Lying-for-Jesus,Richard-Dawkins,page131#182393" target="_blank"><font color="#8080E0"<u>
just ahead, and again followed by the closing string.

Another use of the relative URL is to put smilies in your comments. There is a page of smilies over in the RD Forum that you can get through the relative URL ./forum/images/smilies so if you paste this string in your comment:

<img src="./forum/images/smilies/icon_wink.gif" width="15" height="15" alt=";)" title="Wink" />

You will get:

180. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #182385 by Quine on May 19, 2008 at 10:43 pm

It does not sound like he (tx) bothered to look at the link in my last post. If he had, he would have learned about how changes in the DNA sequences that control the expression of the possible proteins from the gene library in each cell cause much faster evolutionary changes than working out new proteins.

If you look at this set of pages about the evolution of elephants you can see that the trunk starts developing by as late as Palaeomastodon some 35 million years ago. This much smaller animal likely had a generation time shorter than today's elephant, but just for rough calculation let us assume the average generation time is less than 35 years, so there have been at least 1 million generations to get to today. If evolution only changed things by 1% of 1% of 1% per generation, it would be enough. Yes, you are not going to detect 1% of 1% of 1%. [Edit: This is just a simple linear fit that does not take into consideration the exponential nature of changes as in compound interest.]

Specific wiring diagrams for nerves and blood vessels and many other phenotypic characteristics are not in the DNA. These things emerge as the cells grow along side each other and follow chemical messages from their neighbors during development. This is why identical twins who have identical DNA do not have identical fingerprints or retinal scans. Getting a long trunk on an elephant requires the DNA to generate the growth messages for all the cell types involved (I don't think any new cell types are involved), but much of the wiring and circulatory system and muscle connections are going to work themselves out during development. Not a big deal, especially if you have a million generations to try things out.

181. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #182358 by Quine on May 19, 2008 at 8:42 pm

Well, txpiper, your last post steps out of your pattern, and does add to the dialog, and as such, deserves a reply.

I found the Science Daily piece very interesting. If the myosin 2 protein is also used in early stage development, it would explain why any change to its structure would be deadly (even if that change would not effect the adult organism), and thus making it unchanging through vast spaces of evolutionary time. The great thing about the theory is that it makes these kinds of predictions that we can go check.

Did you also see the link to this article that was on the same page?

182. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #182317 by Quine on May 19, 2008 at 4:47 pm

I can't believe I did'nt mention this, or anyone else for that matter.

We did, multiple times; he just ignored it.

P.S. Big-T, I just rode my bike (bicycle) to the store and back (7 km each way with BIG hill) and found it to be much harder than it was 15 lbs. ago.

183. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #182159 by Quine on May 19, 2008 at 10:03 am

Dr B, best wishes for your speedy recovery. I have been interested for some time in the technology of bone prosthesis and wonder what you think of this example of the use of pyrolytic carbon for scaphoid replacement.

Your position about the motorcycle is understandable given what you have seen in your profession. Perhaps Herr Benway could look into body armor and promises of conservative riding technique to win you over (unless he wants a Harley, which I suspect, is the case).

184. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #181869 by Quine on May 18, 2008 at 1:51 pm

(1) Go get questions and answers about evolution.
(2) Throw away the correct answers and write in bogus sound-alikes
(3) Present the above and declare that it does not work
(4) Sit back and laugh as those attempting to help do the job of explaining the correct answers
(5) Tell everyone that it is still nonsense
(6) go to (1)

One of the common wrong answer straw men is about the impossibility of evolution of enzymes (ref) because they are such complex strings of amino acids that must be just so. The truth is that evolution has produced many different sequences that do roughly the same thing. Also, different parts of the sequences evolve at different rates because they have more or less impact on catalytic efficiency (ref). Sometimes single amino acid substitution will switch the enzyme into a form that does something else that is also useful (ref).

Complex protein molecules did not have to appear fully formed in their modern complexity; they evolved -- get over it.

185. The amazing intelligence of crows

Comment #181651 by Quine on May 17, 2008 at 7:37 pm

Thanks phil, I see that page has the link to the Scientific American Frontiers video at the bottom of the page.

This video with Alan Alda is one of the best. I especially like the last part where they leave Alex alone with his MIT Media Lab web interface, and Alex calls up music and video, and then we see him doing a sing-along.

There have been many interesting stories posted by students who worked in the lab with Alex. Dr. Pepperberg's book will be coming out in the fall, and I am looking forward to that.

186. The amazing intelligence of crows

Comment #181614 by Quine on May 17, 2008 at 4:48 pm

Hi Nova,

There is something to the brain to body mass ratio, but I tend to be careful there. It is understandable if the cost to an organism of supporting each cell is about the same, and the value (in getting genes into successive generations) of what the brain does is about the same for all individual animals. That is not always the case. (Also, it is hard to imagine a simple rule is going to work from the scale of the Orca on one end down to the Portia spider one the other.)

For bird intelligence there are also different things of value. Sometimes it is flying and navigation skills, or visual processing, or auditory processing. I would be tempted to teach Betty to pick locks, but if she escaped and taught that to other crows, I might be charged with a crime against humanity.

A different kind of intelligence is shown in this Attenborough Bower Bird video.

What I have found in the CAG parrot is less focus on tool using and much more on emotional reading and interaction. Some people find this very compelling. After the death of the famous Alex, folks have been using the web to actively trade anecdotal clues about these birds. I have been collecting some of these, and the impression that there is some kind of consciousness in there is very strong.

187. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #181585 by Quine on May 17, 2008 at 3:14 pm

(1) Go get questions and answers about evolution.
(2) Throw away the correct answers and write in bogus sound-alikes
(3) Present the above and declare that it does not work
(4) Sit back and laugh as those attempting to help do the job of explaining the correct answers
(5) Tell everyone that it is still nonsense
(6) go to (1)

I think it is unlikely that he thinks that we are going to get to a point where we cannot put the correct answers back in, I just think he views it as an effective way to waste people's time. However, there is the danger that a part of his mind is actually learning things that will cause progressively greater cognitive dissonance until he comes to see himself as ... well, the word escapes me, but perhaps Irate will help me out.

188. Pelosi, Reid shunning Ten Commandments?

Comment #181259 by Quine on May 16, 2008 at 7:25 pm

Then these nut jobs can fire up their Noah's Ark 2 spaceship ...

Would that be the "B" ship along with the telephone sanitizers?

Seriously, you really think these nut jobs could work a spaceship?

189. The amazing intelligence of crows

Comment #181216 by Quine on May 16, 2008 at 4:23 pm

DB, see this study of language and "footedness" in African Grey parrots.

190. The amazing intelligence of crows

Comment #181145 by Quine on May 16, 2008 at 1:20 pm

Yes, seqenenre, that was the clip from Attenborough's Life of Birds series that was used in the TED video. Also, the Robin behavior mentioned by Rickshaw is covered in another section where it is shown in context to another bird that follows tortoises around to peck at the divots left in their path. I strongly recommend this program on DVD to all.

Also in that series, Attenborough covers the crows that use sticks to get grubs out of wood, and even shows that some of them take to carrying around their "favorite" sticks. However, this makes what Betty did in the video even more amazing because nowhere in hundreds of thousands of years of evolution did these birds get the skill to use a wire that, unlike a stick, could be bent into a hook.

191. The amazing intelligence of crows

Comment #181121 by Quine on May 16, 2008 at 12:55 pm

Thanks, Black Wolf, as always the most interesting developments are at the edge of what life can manage. I am sad for the religious folks who close their eyes to something so literally wonderful and magnificent.

192. The amazing intelligence of crows

Comment #181076 by Quine on May 16, 2008 at 11:52 am

I just had the experience of taking care of a friend's CAG parrot for two weeks, and I can tell you the things they can do just fly in the face of our usual ideas of their small brain size. This has caused me to wonder if part of the optimization for flying has caused birds to have neuroanatomy that gets more efficient processing per gram of brain weight than we who are bound to the ground. Anyone know about research on this?

P.S. That would go for bats as well.

193. UC Berkeley is going to court over Evolution website

Comment #181058 by Quine on May 16, 2008 at 11:16 am

Dr B, I don't know all the variations after the Protestants broke away; I was going on the story from the old scriptures that is used to put humans in a lower (bad) position from which jumps the need to be "saved." This degradation is a powerful conditioning aspect so as to make the mumbo-jumbo being blathered by the preacher seem to have actual value. The doctrine of 'original sin' may be too specific, but I was thinking about this general idea of physical elevation above the animal kingdom, yet spiritual degradation, that are both washed away by the knowledge of evolution.

P.S.

Catholics accept both original sin and evolution. For them, the talking snake story is allegorical.

IMHO, it is easier for them to tell the sheeple that, theologically, black is white than to fight the evidence of evolution.

194. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #181045 by Quine on May 16, 2008 at 10:57 am

Rev, thanks for that great link to that piece by Richard Carrier. It eviscerates all these bogus retrospective probability claims. I am going to quote the final paragraph for the benefit of all here:

Theories which make the origin of life plausible are hypotheses like any others, awaiting future research--in fact, generating that research. On the other hand, in the words of Frank Salisbury, "Special creation or a directed evolution would solve the problem of the complexity of the gene, but such an idea has little scientific value in the sense of suggesting experiments." And the experiments suggested by Salisbury and his colleagues led, in fact, to a simplification of the very problem that vexed Salisbury in 1969. Science, once again, gets somewhere. Creationism gets us nowhere. Coppedge suspected in his day "many evolutionists have avoided such investigations [into the odds against life forming] because they intuitively recognize that it will threaten evolutionary doctrine" (p. 234). Yet scientists hardly avoided the matter at all. Quite to the contrary, while creationists engaged in no actual research for twenty-five years and contributed nothing to our understanding of biology, scientists chewed away at the very problems Salisbury and Coppedge discussed, and solved a great many of them (see Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, 1993). That none of them thought to make arbitrary and groundless guesses for the purpose of calculating a useless statistic is a testament to their wisdom, just as it is a testament to the ignorance of those, like Coppedge, who actually do this. We only need consider which has added to our knowledge to see who is making better use of their time.

195. UC Berkeley is going to court over Evolution website

Comment #181027 by Quine on May 16, 2008 at 10:15 am

As Sally Luxmoore says, 'original sin' is the key point that cannot be undermined because then the whole house of cards falls. Evolution shows a continuous natural history with no sudden point when humans were "elevated" above the animal kingdom. Those who want to keep religion and evolution have to play the all too human trick of holding conflicting ideas to be true in the same brain. It is just what we do.

196. Vatican: It's OK to believe in aliens

Comment #180668 by Quine on May 15, 2008 at 1:43 pm

You know, if they can just get the aliens to tithe, it would put the Vatican Bank on the galactic financial front page; think how big the Pope's hat would be after that!

197. UC Berkeley is going to court over Evolution website

Comment #180663 by Quine on May 15, 2008 at 1:20 pm

Given the record of the Ninth Circuit, I do not see how they are going to rule against UC. If they did, the Church of the FSM could go after UC on the whole global warming v. pirates doctrine.

198. The Neural Buddhists

Comment #180607 by Quine on May 15, 2008 at 10:12 am

Comment #180450 by njwong

If our brain wiring were thwacked for whatever reason, our blemished brain might create an illusion so realistic (e.g. an epiphanic experience) that no external party will convince us that what we have experienced isn't real. However, since our brains also control logic thinking, even rational thinking will be skewed. If that is the case, no amount of persuasion or evidence by others will convince us otherwise of the delusion that our blemished brain has formed.

And therein lies the rub. So, Saul/Paul has this fit on the road to Damascus and is transformed into someone, who, so completely believes his vision that all external tests by all he meets indicate that he is speaking the truth. Tests of torture and fear of death do not turn him from the path, so he must be right, and we should throw down our worldly ways and follow him. There is nothing so dangerous as the followers of a true prophet.

P.S. Thanks for the V. S. Ramachandran link. If you google around a bit you will find more of his recent things that continue in this line (as I did in this post).

199. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #180582 by Quine on May 15, 2008 at 8:42 am

Does anyone else notice the following troll behavior:

(1) Go get questions and answers about evolution.
(2) Throw away the correct answers and write in bogus sound-alikes
(3) Present the above and declare that it does not work
(4) Sit back and laugh as those attempting to help do the job of explaining the correct answers
(5) Tell everyone that it is still nonsense
(6) go to (1)

200. The Neural Buddhists

Comment #180405 by Quine on May 14, 2008 at 8:03 pm

RM:

Quine - thank you for that most useful and enlightening link.
May I make so bold as to share my thoughts with you as they develop and evolve instead of waiting for the conclusion? If that is inappropriate here, tell me and I'll stop.

I am willing to answer some things but you have to understand that your prior record has removed your presumption of innocence, and thrown the rest of us into the domain of the "fool me twice" admonition. Please understand why we will be careful.

You said: "your internal subjective experiences are not useful for us no matter how real they seem to you." And I replied that this was my "hard problem".
But I am wondering if I did not reply a little too quickly. Certainly, what you say is intuitively "felt" to be correct. The knee-jerk reaction (well, my knee-jerk reaction at least) is, "Well, of course, that's logical."
But if we take that a little further, does that mean that none of my subjective experiences have any relevance whatsoever for people with whom I might wish to communicate? If I admit that, then notions of empathy or even projection would have to be abandoned. And even if the expression, "I know how you feel," can never be totally true, it can often be sufficiently true to permit varying degrees of understanding between two people. So, no, I can not agree that all my "internal, subjective experiences" are always completely useless for other people.

My statement was in the context of what establishes external truth. Yes, you can tell people "what it is like" for you, and it may be true for you. There are many times and situations in which this is the most important thing. Theological ontology is not one of them.

Beyond the possibility of vast differences between your "qualia" and mine, at some level, there are obvious similarities, some common points of reference.
The only question that remains to be answered on that point (and it is far from being a negligible one) is "How can I distinguish between the areas of overlap, and the areas that are unique to one single human being?"
(When I was ten years old, my intellectual 15 year-old sister used to taunt me with things like, "Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you - they might have different tastes.")

Which is why it is better to start from the position of not doing unto others what you would not want done unto you (like religious indoctrination) until you get some idea of what they would like.

The second point, which is so huge that I failed to notice it when reading your post, is this : my epiphany experience did not occur as a result of another person's internal, subjective experience. And yes, the "temporary brain infarction" explanation could work very well here. Maybe a few deep-breathing exercises would have made it all go away. Maybe Saul of Tarsus had an epileptic fit. But are temporary brain infarctions and epileptic fits life-changing?

Sometimes, but it has not been long enough to say in your case.

Could a brain infarction make me perceive so many things differently? Could it open to me to a greater sensation of love - given and received? But that is not the point. For the moment, at least. The point is that nobody told me that I could have the experience of God the way I did. Nobody else's internal, subjective experience procured it for me. So why should I worry about the usefulness of my internal, subjective experience for other people?

You do not have to worry; it is not about us. You might worry if self delusion has set in, but that may not be a bad thing depending on how it impacts your life.

Something else is going on here. If you have never, ever tasted salt, there is no way I could describe the taste of "saltiness" to you. You could only discover it for yourself. If you have never stood on the parapet of a 90 metre high bridge, and felt the pure terror of throwing yourself into the void, even though you've paid good money to have someone attach you to an elastic rope, then I could never find adequate words to communicate that sensation to you. (and, yes, I've done that!) As I said, I haven't finished thinking this one through yet. Thank you for bearing with me thus far. I sense that "Measured empathy and controlled projection" will become important notions here. And, without wishing to spark off an avalanche of insults, I must include this idea, "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God"

Yes, your description of the personal subjectivity of tasting salt is exemplary of the isolation we must each live with. Just as your physical body presents other limitations, you cannot directly experience what it is "like" to be someone else. Thus we have the expressions of art and music (your strong suite) to help us with an approximation of transferring this "likeness." We (sociopaths notwithstanding) are assisted by mirror neurons which pick up the "other" from cues and add to our subjective feelings. All of this is an important part of our emotional lives, but does not, impact on what really does or does not objectively exist.

Bottom line: the study of qualia is part of trying to understand consciousness but establishes nothing supernatural. It has been tried for decades; it is a dry hole.