...some of the great "sci-fi" Card was talking about is fantasy, not sci-fi...
Maybe Card realizes that there is a class of literature that is involves fictional settings (As opposed to just fictional people and plots.), and it really doesn't matter if the made-up setting is 500 years in a future, in another dimension where magic works, or 100 years in the past where the Confederacy won the civil war.
People who think there's a real difference are just silly. You can like 'fictional setting that involves future technology' and not 'fictional setting that involves magic', just like you can like Hercules Poirot and not Sherlock Holmes, but genre-wise, they are the same.
The genre, whatever you call it, just changes the 'universally assumed setting' that all other fiction is set in (Our universe, past or present, perhaps with a fictional town or president or something, but 'our universe'.) and explore how that difference affects characters and events.
Um, no. I didn't say anything about the Great Schism at all. Your entire complaint seems to be the idea I was somehow talking about that, and I didn't even mention it.
'The Church divided itself in half' is a perfectly accurate way of describing the way the church set itself up with Rome and Constantinople. Yes, in theory, it had already divided itself up with Antioch and Alexandria, and later Jerusalem, but I don't see how that's incredibly relevent unless you want to quibble about 'half'. Antioch and Alexandria didn't play an important role at all, whereas by the time fo the Fourth Crusade, Rome had long fallen and the Byzantian empire was being run from (duh) Constantinople.
Constantinople was a seperate yet equal part of the Catholic Church, even with the weirdness about them excommunicating each other in 1054. (Look, I can mention the Great Schism if I want.)
And I don't know why the hell you're talking about what they 'wanted' to do...they did sack Constantinople, and that's all I said.
That's better than the Fourth Crusade, when they sacked Constantinople, which had been Christian since it was founded. (Well, renamed.)
In fact, it was the Eastern half of the Church! It wasn't some splinter group, the Church had divided itself in half when Rome fell, and they both recognized each other. In fact, 9 years latter, Bishop of Constantinople was placed second to the Pope!
After the Pope learned of the first attack, when the man the Crusaders were paid to put on the throne was put there, the Pope forbid them from attacking again, which they did anyway when that man died.
Not only did they attack it again, but they then burned the city. After they had conquered it.
The Fourth Crusade has to go down in history as the most absurd of the Crusades. Watch the Church...attack itself! Let's convert those Catholics to Catholics!
If you were trying to make a semantic difference between 'law' and 'theory', you picked an idiotic example.
We know Newton's Law of Gravity are wrong. It is an absolute fact it is incorrect, thanks to the orbit of Mercury. It has been disproven, so it's not even correct to call it a current scientific theory.
In science, 'law' just means 'theory or observation that's been boiled down to a single equation or phrase'. It can even be known to be wrong in certain circumstances and still used, which theories cannot! (Well, they can, but people have to fix them.)
Calling it a law just means scientists can take at that equation or rule and just use it without having to justify that 'watts equals amps times volts' or 'an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an outside force', and other scientists are fine with it.
As such you can use Newton's Law of Gravity, F = G M m / r2, to calculate how fast an object falls, and no scientist will blink. That's the only reason it's called a law.
No one's teaching science as the religion of the US.
They're teaching science as the 'method of figuring things out' of the US.
Which is basically is, because no one's come up with another means to produce anything interesting. Sure, figuring things out via belief produces a lot of information, but, oddly enough, it never seems to end up in anything concrete.
The problem is that 'string theory' isn't a theory in competition with, say, quantum mechanics.
Right now, it's mathmatically identical to quantum mechanics , or at least 99.999999% identical, and no one is sure where it's not.
The only reason string theory exists is we know quantum mechanics can't explain the universe, because it falls apart at macroscopic levels.
And we have no useful theory of what's actually going on in QM...or, rather, we have too many of them. Transactional and Many Worlds are the best two quantum theories.
We have the math, and nothing behind it, we have no idea what it means. Hence calling it quantum 'mechanics' instead of quantum 'theory'. Quantum mechanics is not hard, we had that like 60 years ago. Quantum theory is some crazy shit, and working on it makes no sense when we don't know why QM breaks at the macroscopic scale. (Aka, collapsing the wave function, which we don't understand at all.)
So we need a theory that works exactly, or almost exactly, like quantum mechanics. Except it needs to stop working like that at a certain scale for an explicably reason.
So someone realized that, hey, you can explain that if particles are actually strings...
String theory is a theory that needs to exist and be testable, but really isn't all the way there yet. They've got some math that matches QM, but that's it.
In fact, I think they've basically turned that into m-brane theory, where these 'strings' are actually two n-dimensional plains that intersect with each other...
And if they were teaching string theory in schools, scientists would probably have a problem with that, too.;)
Yes, their pride and arrogance caused them to make the tower.
But that's not why God destroyed it. There's nothing in there about that. He destroys it because they're right, they can make a tower that reaches to the heavens, and then they could do anything they wanted.
One could say evolution explains the continued survival of a relatively small group of people from ancient Palestine after 4000 years.
When you think about it, there must have been thousands of tiny groups like that.
One of them, however, invented monotheism, and said 'Don't worship other Gods', and because of that they never got assimilated.
It's evolution in action! Survival of the fittest group! Their religion kept them apart. No one took their religion, and they didn't take anyone else's.
Then, later on, a mutation of this religion said it was okay for others to take the religion, and it near-immediately took over half the world.
Which I guess shows the theory of 'punctuated equilibrium'. Instead of a bunch of tiny changes, one person gets magnified into one huge change that changes everything.
Thou shall not kill is possibly the most idiotic mistranslation possible. It's the the same book, probably in the same chapter, as verses telling you to stone people!
Hello. Bit of a logically inconsistency there. Don't kill people. Kill people if they do X. Um, okay.
You have to wonder how that translation slipped past quality control. Yes, it's actually 'murder' that you are forbidden to do, not 'kill'.
Speaking of mistranslations, a fake mistranslation is the often-heard claim that 'witches' should be 'poisoners'. In some places, yes, the word used there can mean that, but when it condemns witches to death, it explictly is the word meaning 'supernatural women', although that connoted more than just 'spell casting', like seeing the future and whatnot.
The best way to point out flaws in science would be to look at science at the turn of the last century.
Damn, I mean, the century before last. You know what I mean.
Anyway, when they had everything figured out, except the pesky question of the speed of light and photovoltic effect, which brought us relativity and quantum theory at basically the same time and completely changed everything.
It is a sad fact that most people graduated from public school with no conception whatsoever of what effect the Christian faith has had on American history, culture, world events, and the direction of the world! It's a travesty! Scientists have pushed so hard against religion it's almost absurd. Even if religion were scientically undeniably proven false it should be studied, understood, respected, by educators, scientists, schools, and students. It is a major force in so, so many ways!
You're decrying the lack of humanities in school, which has nothing at all to do with science at all.
Actaully, I take that back. Humanities is a 'science' to some extent. A social science, but a science nevertheless. It's the studies of humans, basically sociology + history.
So waht you're actually complaining about is the lack of science in school, a specific one. That instead of, say, biology, we should spend some time on 'the human condition'.
Which is a perfectly valid complaint, except...it's not hard science sucking up time in schools that could be used on humanities. At my high school, you could graduate with just one physics class, that really didn't touch on anything at all. It's remedial math and whatnot that's sucking time.
But, hey, if you want to start campaigning for the inclusion of humanities in school (Which will certainly include Christianity. You can't talk about the Western world from 70 AD to present day without Christianity.), I'll be right there with you. Just don't blame science for what the schools ignore.
You can believe that if you want. No one has a problem with it.
Hell, just ask scientists how many of them believe in Murphy's Law, or the hosts of superstitions that many people believe in. Many of them do.
It's the presenting ID as an 'alternate' 'scientific' 'theory' in schools that's the problem. Scientists don't do that.
(It's not alternate, because the only workable ID concept asserts 'Everything happened like the theory of evolution said, but God did it.'. It's not scientific because science starts with facts and makes theories from it, not the other way around. And it's not a theory because theories have to be falsifable.)
ID in reality is merely a thinly disguised way to claim the existence of God has equal scientific validity as...well, no position on God, which is science's normal position.
Hell, I believe there's some sort of metaphysical aspect to reality. I, personally, don't think it's random chance humans evolved. Maybe someday I'll write some philosophical threaty on what I think the meaning of life is. But I can see ID for the crock of shit it is.
If you have a theory that someone did it...let's see either evidence of this person, or a hypothesis about them, who they are, what they want, why they did this.
You can't just assert things exist and stop. If you want to pull God into science, you're going to have to...pull God into science.
And if it become acceptable to look at religion critially, through science, religion is..in trouble. At least the currently popular ones. I point to Mithra. I point to Sumerian stories. Some of Christianity clearly was...well...made up, to put it bluntly. As was Judism.
There's some nice stuff in Christianity, but put it under the magnifying glass of science and it will just wither and die. Which is sad, because if you remove the distortion of the church, I actually think it's a great philosophy.
But if people with crazy beliefs pull them into science, science is going to look at them. People advocating ID need to think long and hard about what they are doing.
And the last time science looked long and hard at religion (Also about evolution.) was the end of the 1800s, and we got all sorts of crazies coming out of the woodwork who claimed they could talk to the dead and whatnot, and a general increase in religious looniness.
The gag is that, to get it taught in school, they desperately refrain from it being the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. They will never say 'God', because their entire premise is that this is some non-theistic 'scientific theory', instead of what it is, an attempt to teach the existence of God in school.
You can have fun with this. When they bring up ID, assert there's absolutely no evidence of aliens and thus their theory that benvolent aliens guided evolution is silly. They'll be startled, and then either claim that it was God, thus showing everyone what they're trying to do, or catch on, and not say anything, at which point you can keep talking about 'their aliens'.
Or, like I suggested on K5, agree with them, that our children should be taught the truth that the world's development has been guided by Parusha, the spirit of the universe, and that life was created when it broke up. (Disclaimer: I don't actually know the Hindu creation story that well, so if someone knows it better and can correct me, feel free.)
Read that story again. Despite what everyone seems to think, God didn't strike them down because of hubris or intelligence or whatever.
Genesis 11:5-7
But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, "If as one people they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
God didn't destroy the tower because he dislikes knowledge, he destroyed the tower because he was afraid of what people could accomplish.
I rewatched The Tolian Web after Enterprise and realized it tied up more loose ends than I thought. (I also realized they went to a hell of a lot of trouble to put the corpses in exactly the right place, which was a nice touch.)
Despite the implications in the TOS episode, we never did figure out what was going on with that area of space, and it honestly actually looks like the Tolians had no idea what's going either. (Remember, they had just annexed that part of space.)
People see them being jerks, and trying to destroy the Enterprise, and assume they did the whole thing, but there's no actual reason for them to be making people go crazy and throwing things out of the universe. It seems like they had no idea anything at all was wrong there.
Granted, we still don't know if the alternate universe Tolians were actually delibrately stealing from another universe's future (Which, paradox-wise, seems a bit safer than stealing from your own.), or if the Defiant ended up there by accident.
Now, the real question is: Does the fact that everyone in the evil universe is amoral have anything to do with the murderous rages the area of space that connected to that universe sent people into? Is that just a weird coincidence, or is there something inherit in the fabric of that universe that makes people into murderous sociopaths? (Although, presumably, if you were born there, you stop trying to throttle everyone to death by the time you're two, or no one would get anything done.)
Incidentally, Veronica Mars is the only other good UPN show at this time besides Enterprise. (Drama-wise, that is. I have no idea about sitcoms.)
Which is probably why they're running ads for it during Enterprise.
Sadly, half the people watching Enterprise at this time don't know what a 'good show' is. Here's a hint: If you liked the last season, you probably don't know what a 'good show' is.;)
Hey, you're allowed a deus ex machinas if you actually have Gods on the series.;)
Anyway, they had a solution to that that didn't require the prophets...it was just to blow up the wormhole, though, and they couldn't do that for plot reasons.
Hey, if they're going out, I thought it was nice they at least showed us what Tolians and Gorn actually looked like. Gorns, IIRC, had crappy costumes, and the most of a Tolian we've seen is that wall thingy in Quarks and a face on a monitor.
The first time I watched, I was annoyed the Tolian web was so quick, and then I realized that these Tolians apparently steal from the 'real' universe's future.
These entire season has been 'trying up loose ends in the Trek universe'. Not only ones like 'What's with the Klingons' faces?', but the really obscure ones like 'When the USS Defiant got pushed out of the universe in TOS by the Tolians, where'd it go?', which is so obscure even die-hand fans probably forgot about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, I thought Ayn Rand was the second-rate Ayn Rand.
Maybe Card realizes that there is a class of literature that is involves fictional settings (As opposed to just fictional people and plots.), and it really doesn't matter if the made-up setting is 500 years in a future, in another dimension where magic works, or 100 years in the past where the Confederacy won the civil war.
People who think there's a real difference are just silly. You can like 'fictional setting that involves future technology' and not 'fictional setting that involves magic', just like you can like Hercules Poirot and not Sherlock Holmes, but genre-wise, they are the same.
The genre, whatever you call it, just changes the 'universally assumed setting' that all other fiction is set in (Our universe, past or present, perhaps with a fictional town or president or something, but 'our universe'.) and explore how that difference affects characters and events.
No, that's just a coincidence.
'The Church divided itself in half' is a perfectly accurate way of describing the way the church set itself up with Rome and Constantinople. Yes, in theory, it had already divided itself up with Antioch and Alexandria, and later Jerusalem, but I don't see how that's incredibly relevent unless you want to quibble about 'half'. Antioch and Alexandria didn't play an important role at all, whereas by the time fo the Fourth Crusade, Rome had long fallen and the Byzantian empire was being run from (duh) Constantinople.
Constantinople was a seperate yet equal part of the Catholic Church, even with the weirdness about them excommunicating each other in 1054. (Look, I can mention the Great Schism if I want.)
And I don't know why the hell you're talking about what they 'wanted' to do...they did sack Constantinople, and that's all I said.
One word: SimSavior.
In fact, it was the Eastern half of the Church! It wasn't some splinter group, the Church had divided itself in half when Rome fell, and they both recognized each other. In fact, 9 years latter, Bishop of Constantinople was placed second to the Pope!
After the Pope learned of the first attack, when the man the Crusaders were paid to put on the throne was put there, the Pope forbid them from attacking again, which they did anyway when that man died.
Not only did they attack it again, but they then burned the city. After they had conquered it.
The Fourth Crusade has to go down in history as the most absurd of the Crusades. Watch the Church...attack itself! Let's convert those Catholics to Catholics!
We know Newton's Law of Gravity are wrong. It is an absolute fact it is incorrect, thanks to the orbit of Mercury. It has been disproven, so it's not even correct to call it a current scientific theory.
In science, 'law' just means 'theory or observation that's been boiled down to a single equation or phrase'. It can even be known to be wrong in certain circumstances and still used, which theories cannot! (Well, they can, but people have to fix them.)
Calling it a law just means scientists can take at that equation or rule and just use it without having to justify that 'watts equals amps times volts' or 'an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an outside force', and other scientists are fine with it.
As such you can use Newton's Law of Gravity, F = G M m / r2, to calculate how fast an object falls, and no scientist will blink. That's the only reason it's called a law.
They're teaching science as the 'method of figuring things out' of the US.
Which is basically is, because no one's come up with another means to produce anything interesting. Sure, figuring things out via belief produces a lot of information, but, oddly enough, it never seems to end up in anything concrete.
It's called Humanities, not biology. ;)
Right now, it's mathmatically identical to quantum mechanics , or at least 99.999999% identical, and no one is sure where it's not.
The only reason string theory exists is we know quantum mechanics can't explain the universe, because it falls apart at macroscopic levels.
And we have no useful theory of what's actually going on in QM...or, rather, we have too many of them. Transactional and Many Worlds are the best two quantum theories.
We have the math, and nothing behind it, we have no idea what it means. Hence calling it quantum 'mechanics' instead of quantum 'theory'. Quantum mechanics is not hard, we had that like 60 years ago. Quantum theory is some crazy shit, and working on it makes no sense when we don't know why QM breaks at the macroscopic scale. (Aka, collapsing the wave function, which we don't understand at all.)
So we need a theory that works exactly, or almost exactly, like quantum mechanics. Except it needs to stop working like that at a certain scale for an explicably reason.
So someone realized that, hey, you can explain that if particles are actually strings...
String theory is a theory that needs to exist and be testable, but really isn't all the way there yet. They've got some math that matches QM, but that's it.
In fact, I think they've basically turned that into m-brane theory, where these 'strings' are actually two n-dimensional plains that intersect with each other...
And if they were teaching string theory in schools, scientists would probably have a problem with that, too. ;)
However, that's all the motive that's given. It's not about human hubris, it's about human ability.
But that's not why God destroyed it. There's nothing in there about that. He destroys it because they're right, they can make a tower that reaches to the heavens, and then they could do anything they wanted.
When you think about it, there must have been thousands of tiny groups like that.
One of them, however, invented monotheism, and said 'Don't worship other Gods', and because of that they never got assimilated.
It's evolution in action! Survival of the fittest group! Their religion kept them apart. No one took their religion, and they didn't take anyone else's.
Then, later on, a mutation of this religion said it was okay for others to take the religion, and it near-immediately took over half the world.
Which I guess shows the theory of 'punctuated equilibrium'. Instead of a bunch of tiny changes, one person gets magnified into one huge change that changes everything.
Hello. Bit of a logically inconsistency there. Don't kill people. Kill people if they do X. Um, okay.
You have to wonder how that translation slipped past quality control. Yes, it's actually 'murder' that you are forbidden to do, not 'kill'.
Speaking of mistranslations, a fake mistranslation is the often-heard claim that 'witches' should be 'poisoners'. In some places, yes, the word used there can mean that, but when it condemns witches to death, it explictly is the word meaning 'supernatural women', although that connoted more than just 'spell casting', like seeing the future and whatnot.
Damn, I mean, the century before last. You know what I mean.
Anyway, when they had everything figured out, except the pesky question of the speed of light and photovoltic effect, which brought us relativity and quantum theory at basically the same time and completely changed everything.
You're decrying the lack of humanities in school, which has nothing at all to do with science at all.
Actaully, I take that back. Humanities is a 'science' to some extent. A social science, but a science nevertheless. It's the studies of humans, basically sociology + history.
So waht you're actually complaining about is the lack of science in school, a specific one. That instead of, say, biology, we should spend some time on 'the human condition'.
Which is a perfectly valid complaint, except...it's not hard science sucking up time in schools that could be used on humanities. At my high school, you could graduate with just one physics class, that really didn't touch on anything at all. It's remedial math and whatnot that's sucking time.
But, hey, if you want to start campaigning for the inclusion of humanities in school (Which will certainly include Christianity. You can't talk about the Western world from 70 AD to present day without Christianity.), I'll be right there with you. Just don't blame science for what the schools ignore.
Hell, just ask scientists how many of them believe in Murphy's Law, or the hosts of superstitions that many people believe in. Many of them do.
It's the presenting ID as an 'alternate' 'scientific' 'theory' in schools that's the problem. Scientists don't do that.
(It's not alternate, because the only workable ID concept asserts 'Everything happened like the theory of evolution said, but God did it.'. It's not scientific because science starts with facts and makes theories from it, not the other way around. And it's not a theory because theories have to be falsifable.)
ID in reality is merely a thinly disguised way to claim the existence of God has equal scientific validity as...well, no position on God, which is science's normal position.
Hell, I believe there's some sort of metaphysical aspect to reality. I, personally, don't think it's random chance humans evolved. Maybe someday I'll write some philosophical threaty on what I think the meaning of life is. But I can see ID for the crock of shit it is.
If you have a theory that someone did it...let's see either evidence of this person, or a hypothesis about them, who they are, what they want, why they did this.
You can't just assert things exist and stop. If you want to pull God into science, you're going to have to...pull God into science.
And if it become acceptable to look at religion critially, through science, religion is..in trouble. At least the currently popular ones. I point to Mithra. I point to Sumerian stories. Some of Christianity clearly was...well...made up, to put it bluntly. As was Judism.
There's some nice stuff in Christianity, but put it under the magnifying glass of science and it will just wither and die. Which is sad, because if you remove the distortion of the church, I actually think it's a great philosophy.
But if people with crazy beliefs pull them into science, science is going to look at them. People advocating ID need to think long and hard about what they are doing.
And the last time science looked long and hard at religion (Also about evolution.) was the end of the 1800s, and we got all sorts of crazies coming out of the woodwork who claimed they could talk to the dead and whatnot, and a general increase in religious looniness.
You can have fun with this. When they bring up ID, assert there's absolutely no evidence of aliens and thus their theory that benvolent aliens guided evolution is silly. They'll be startled, and then either claim that it was God, thus showing everyone what they're trying to do, or catch on, and not say anything, at which point you can keep talking about 'their aliens'.
Or, like I suggested on K5, agree with them, that our children should be taught the truth that the world's development has been guided by Parusha, the spirit of the universe, and that life was created when it broke up. (Disclaimer: I don't actually know the Hindu creation story that well, so if someone knows it better and can correct me, feel free.)
Genesis 11:5-7
But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, "If as one people they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
God didn't destroy the tower because he dislikes knowledge, he destroyed the tower because he was afraid of what people could accomplish.
Despite the implications in the TOS episode, we never did figure out what was going on with that area of space, and it honestly actually looks like the Tolians had no idea what's going either. (Remember, they had just annexed that part of space.)
People see them being jerks, and trying to destroy the Enterprise, and assume they did the whole thing, but there's no actual reason for them to be making people go crazy and throwing things out of the universe. It seems like they had no idea anything at all was wrong there.
Granted, we still don't know if the alternate universe Tolians were actually delibrately stealing from another universe's future (Which, paradox-wise, seems a bit safer than stealing from your own.), or if the Defiant ended up there by accident.
Now, the real question is: Does the fact that everyone in the evil universe is amoral have anything to do with the murderous rages the area of space that connected to that universe sent people into? Is that just a weird coincidence, or is there something inherit in the fabric of that universe that makes people into murderous sociopaths? (Although, presumably, if you were born there, you stop trying to throttle everyone to death by the time you're two, or no one would get anything done.)
Which is probably why they're running ads for it during Enterprise.
Sadly, half the people watching Enterprise at this time don't know what a 'good show' is. Here's a hint: If you liked the last season, you probably don't know what a 'good show' is. ;)
Anyway, they had a solution to that that didn't require the prophets...it was just to blow up the wormhole, though, and they couldn't do that for plot reasons.
But, yes, the rest of it was lame.
The first time I watched, I was annoyed the Tolian web was so quick, and then I realized that these Tolians apparently steal from the 'real' universe's future.
These entire season has been 'trying up loose ends in the Trek universe'. Not only ones like 'What's with the Klingons' faces?', but the really obscure ones like 'When the USS Defiant got pushed out of the universe in TOS by the Tolians, where'd it go?', which is so obscure even die-hand fans probably forgot about it.