To give a serious response the real reasons that many of the world's poor cannot compete in world markets are:
1. Protective gov't subsidies (especially on agriculture)
2. Enabling foreign aid (You try opening an indiginous busines to sell clothing in Africa. You get to compete with all the free clothes various aid agencies dump on the market. Good luck. But at least they're not freezing to death in ethiopa now).
I hope you were being sarcastic, but I couldn't detect any sarcasm.
Your browser must not be standards-complian. You need to upgrade. Let's test it out:
[sarcasm] No, I was being totally serious. It's better to run around half-naked killing antelopes with our bare hands. Or maybe a rock.
You see, that's the purity of it. No one controls the rock-market. I can pick one up, or you can pick one up. And if you're rock is sharper than mine, I can beat you over the head with my blunt rock and take your pointy rock. Or I can find my own pointy rock. Whatever.
The point is it's better for everyone to wear animal skins than for me to wear wrangler jeans and you to wear express jeans. [/sarcasm]
You're absolutely right. Poverty is a relative term. 10,000 years ago the gap between the haves and the have-nots was simply a difference in who had killed something to eat that day, and who hadn't. It was a fundamentally classless society.
But now, thanks to the free market economy, we have cars, computers, air travel, phones, TVs, the highway system, refrigerated food, and penicillin. But some people have 60" plasma TVs, and others have 27" TVs that aren't even LCD. So now we have a classed system. And since the gap between a poor person today (which in America may involved a car and a couple color TVs) and a rich person in a free-market system is wider - poverty has increased. Sure, standard of living has increased (most poor people in free market systesm don't get eaten or starve to death), but they are more poor because the free market system has created wealth that they don't have.
What you say is true to an extent, but I'd point out that "physical" and "psychological" are not distinct things, just different regions along a spectrum. The guy at the gym is a good case in point. There are theories that long-distance runners get addicted to the endorphines. There you have a measurable physiological change (the endorphines), so clearly it's not just "psychological", but at the same time I'm not saying that addiction to your own endorphines is the same as addiction to heroine. You can't just neatly divide "physical" and "psychological" into two neat containers. For other examples just look at the placebo effect and the other numerous documented instances of something psychological - like mood or attitude - having a measurable effect on something physical.
Finally, the generalization about treating an illness in terms of symptoms vs. cause is also inadequate. You don't go far enough. In your example you took it back to "plaque in the arteries or whatever". But isn't that in turn just a symptom of deeper ailments? Some, like lifestyle, may be rooted in "psychological" causes. Others, like genetic predisposition, not so much. But the point is that the distinction between "symptom" and "cause" is also largely an artificial one that depends on our definition.
I deinitely think that we let pscyhologists get away with far too much - especially when they start doling out medicine of questionable effect. How much more effective are SSUI (selective seretonin uptake inhibitors) like Prozac then placebo's? The counseling? Then counseling and lifestyle coaching? Nobody knows - it's easier to take a pill than to take responsibility.
The only conclusion that we can safely draw is that the easy answers are wrong, and we have a lot more to learn about the interations between the physical and psychological before we can really make safe distinctions about addictions.
You may think that the consequences are different but they are not
It seems to me that you contradicted this statement yourself. The social consequences are the same or similar (loosing contact with real people) but you mentioned yourself the potential of DUIs and even killing people. Maybe from your perspective there's no difference in consequence, but I'd MUCH rather have someone at home addicted to online poker or whatever than out careening through the streets with a couple thousand pounds of steel. The former may incure some slight cost to me when I have to pay via taxes for their medical support or something (assuming medicaid) the latter may kill me or my wife or someone in family. How can you possibly consider those impacts equal?
Having said that, however, I will definately say that althogh in many ways the Slashdot community is heterogenous there are a few things that we seem incapable of really honestly analyzing. #1 would be porno. Last time someone posted a book review about porno including that fact that for the past 2 - 3 decades psychological studies of humans involving pornography have been impossible to conduct because ethics boards won't allow them - many in the community went through the roof about "right-wing conspiracies" or "religious agenda" - neither of which are very closely related to college ethics boards as far as I know. The fact is that the VAST majority of Slashdot users are into porno (I know, I get the Captain Obvious award) and so messing with it is like messing with the sacred cow.
Internet addiction is similar. I love video games. I read escapist magazine regularly, and I play everything from my old SNES to the Call of Duty 2 on the 360 demo. And I've noticed that WoW has a VERY addiction-like effect on some of my friends (I don't have time to play online games so I don't even own this one). Both of my younger brothers spent inordinate amounts of time (inordinate being defined as "they didn't do anything else" and "missing work") and had some rather scary symptoms. If I got between me and my brothers fix (he used my computer a few years ago and sometimes I needed to get homework done on it) he would get extremely violent - and once or twice physically so (luckily we're the same size so I could hold my own until he realized what he Hell he was doing). The fact is that there probably is some rationalizing going on here.
Procrastination may be an old fault - but can we really pretend that having the internet handy doesn't make it (for some people at least) a lot easier? Just like child porno has been around for a long time - but before the internet far fewer people were involved (can we at least agree that that brand of porno is wrong?).
The internet is really just information. Knowledge is power. Power can be used for good and for destructive purposes. The mature thing to do is realize that and be willing to adress the issues honestly - and without going into hysterics for or against.
And what's to stop us from switching to solid-state storage?
You can already get flash drives as big as what, 8 gig? My laptop has only 40gig HDD, and that's plenty for me. I'd go down to 20 or 30 in a flash (ha ha) if it meant switching to steady-state.
There will always be *something* that's a bottleneck, but concentrating on the bottlenecks can get you the biggest bang:buck performance increase.
If we were really talking about the economics of P2P then we would bring in the other half. You've got revenues and you've also got cost. If P2P reduces revenue but reduces cost even greater than the profit - which is the margin between the two - will increase.
Without evaluating the effect of P2P on cost you're really not able to say anything about the economic effect of P2P at all.
but eventually data will always beat dogma (or by definition it is not longer science).
That's fine, but you're using a narrow definition of "science". If you allow a similary narrow definition of religion, then any religion that does anything immoral or stupid is not really religion.
But in everyday language eugenics was a type of science and fundmamentalism is a type of religion.
I don't really have an opinion on intelligent design because I don't really konw what it is. I'm not sure if they're just trotting Paley's Watch back out or what. So until I actually read some 1-st hand accounts, I just can't say anything about it.
As for materialism, I clearly disagree with you there, but respectfully so. And in any case that's WAY off topic and I don't really have the time to tackle a whole new issue!
Still, it's always nice when I can disagree with people while maintaining mutual respect.
That's really all I'm trying to get across. Science is based on fundamentally unprovable assumptions (or at least one).
Look, my real thesis here is simple. I think that the dichotomy between "religion" and "science" is a false one. The truth is that you have both sincere and domatic religion, and you have both sincere and dogmatic science. But neither religion nor science are of necessity fundamentally dogmatic or sincere.
I'm not saying they are the same either. Just that they a - overlap, and b - are based on similar reasoning. Sincere science is based on starting with an unprovable assumption and making observations and experiments to attempt to increase knowledge of things that can be quantified. It's a communal process because quantifiable information can be communicated without loss of data. Thus scientific progress involves co-operation, standing on the shoulders of giants, and the realm of science grows from geneation to generation.
Religion, of the sincere type, is based on taking another unprobavable assumption and living a life designed to test, develop, and refine religious hypotheses. The difference is that religious "data" is generally non-quantifiable and non-reproducible. There can be some communcation and sharing, but it's an inherently personal process. You can teach someone calculus, but you can't teach someone religion in the same sense. You can teach them about religion, but that's not the same thing. Thus, while there is a communal aspect to religion, you can't really stand on the shoulders of giants you have to do it on your own, and the sphere of sincere religion is, in my opinion, static.
Dogmatic religion is a parasite. When you have a bunch of people who believe in God, and who believe in doing what God says, you have a source of tremendous power. If you can corrupt sincere faith (which is just drawing conclusions based on insufficient data because, as you mentioned, there's no better way) into a bastardized version of faith (which says you just affirm principles based on sheer will power) then you can use dogmatic faith to get religious people to do whatever you tell them too. The temptation to replace the sincere faith with the dogmatic faith is poweful, the two concepts are similar, and the effects can be seen throughout history. Masses of people supporting leaders for political gain in the name of God. Dogmatic religion is the opiate of the masses, I would say. It fulfills a societal need by helping people deal with a primal fear of the unknown, of death, and by being used to answer moral dilemnas. Feel guilty? By indulgences. It survives not on any rational basis but on a claim to authority (The Bible tells me so! or The Koran tells me so! or just God tells me so!)
But religion has been around for 1,000s of years. Science, as an independent institution, is relatively new. And I already see signs that it can be hijacked in similar ways. Just take a look at eugenics (especially in Nazi Germany). That was a parasitic use of corruped scientific research to yield greater political power. Sure, that wasn't "real" science, but blowing people up in Iraq isn't real religion either.
Furthermore, scientific institutions now replace some religious institutions in fulfilling social roles. Afriad of dying? You used to pray to God, dream of heaveen, or some such religious work-around. Now? You can dream of immortality, or at least prolonged youth thanks to science. As a result, the immense power latent in religious institutions is now being gradually transferred to academic and scientific institutions. Dogmatic science even perpetuates itself in the exact same way as religion. If God really talks to you, then it's probably a good reason for people to listen. Similarly, if you've actually spent years of your life in intense study of science, you probably have valuable insights that may be applied to other areas. But the second someone says "God talked to me therefore
This could not happen if Kuhn's theory was correct.
I think you must be working with a drastically oversimplified version of Kuhn's theory.
Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition. - Kuhn
Kuhn believed, and I'm trying to remember this off the top of my head, that science depicts itself as a kind of onward-marching juggernaut progressively accumulating and refining knowledge. His contention was that in actual fact, scientific "progress" is often far more sporadic, and involves far more false starts and failures and abandoned avenues, then the glosses we get in science text books (which tend to give the impression that scientific progress has been a historic inevitability). You seem to have the same rosey view of science as these text-books. That science is fundamentally unchanged and will always correct its own errors as time goes by. The fact that some theories have been overthrown within the context of a continuous scientific tradition is utterly insufficient to prove Kuhn's theory.
Kuhn believed that science consisted in answering questions - and that the methodology we used to answer those questions, and the questions we considered answerable, depended on the paradigm in which we were operating. The paradigm itself is not subject to the kind of continuous, one-dimensional progress you think it is. Paradigms come and go in revolutions that overthrow not specific theories but the very nature of the questions we seek to answer and the avenues we see as open to answering those questions.
I'll be honest, I'm rusty on this and it's not an area of my expertise. I know enough to know that your out-of-hand dismissal of Kuhn is unwarranted, but I do not know enough to mount any more of a defense than what I've got here at this time.
In closing, it's those paradigms, the fundamental questions science believes it can answer, than I believe rest largely on unquestioned assumptions. But I need to do more research before I can bring more to bear than this, so I'm just going to have to do my best to gracefully exit the discussion at this point.
Some Mormons believe that. And it is not scientific. But it's not part of the religion, just the culture. It's not required of all members that they become either theologians or historians, but among those Mormons who are the belief was pretty much debunked by Sorensen many years ago when he pointed out that the Book of Mormon most likely took place within a region only a couple hundred miles wide and long - not over the entire South and Central American continent. So even before the blood testing came out there was really no reason to believe this anyway. It's a straw man.
People should really learn to do two things before they impose "Mormon" beliefs on me in an effort to score rhetorical points.
1 - Check to see if the belief is even really Mormon at all. 2 - Look up the logical fallacy of "poisoning the well". Even if I did believe that, or some other non-scientific tidbit, that wouldn't be sufficient to disprove my points - only to make me look bad. Which are you trying to do?
Certainly not all religion fosters literacy! That should go without saying. I was just pointing out that some religions do.
But I would contend that there are two broad types of religion: the sincere and the purely domatic. The purely dogmatic is pretty much arbitrary in its beliefs and requires adherents to surrender their own thoughts and opinions and simply believe (where belief is defined as merely using sheer will power on a belief - kind of like the sumo wrestling of wishful thinking). But there is another type of religious thought: the type that in its sincerity requires adherents (of either a conventional organized religion or free-thinkers) to evaluate, question, and doubt. Obediance in this context, while superficially identical, is fundamentally different because it is obediance informed by prior, reasoned belief. Kind of like trusting someone you know vs. doing whatever anyone tells you. Belief in those religions is of the conventional, rational sense - drawing conclusions from frequently insufficient data with full awareness that the data is insufficient.
I would also go further and say that those exact principles can be applied to science as well. There are plenty of dogmatic scientists. Even mathematicians have occaisionally been dogmatic throughout history. This isn't to say that science is inherently dogmatic - to the extent that they were dogmatic they were rejecting the real principles of science as we accept them today. True science is not dogmatic.
The only reason that religion is not equated with reason and rational thought is that there's a very, very long history of substituting one definition of belief for the other. This is a subtle change that requires adherents to obey without thinking and allows religious leaders to convert piety into political capital. They no longer get to evaluate their leaders, or even their religion itself, before swearing allegiance to it - allowing anyone to take over the church if they can sieze control of the hierarchy. This confusion of faith by dogma vs. faith as sincere belief continues in mainstream churches today and is institutionally embraced by some religions - thus leading to the (partially deserved) bad reputation of religion in general.
Meanwhile science continues to institutionally reject dogma for the most part. I'd say some arguably scientific institions like the AMA and the pyschiatric equivalent are just as dogmatic on some issues for political reasons. It may even be worth pointing out that science, as we understand it today, is much newer than religion. It already starts to make appeals to authority in some cases. This mirrors religious abuse. "Listen to me, because God gave me authority and thus you MUST believe or be a heretic!" is not that different from "Listen to me, because I have a PhD and therefore you MUST believe or be a fundamentalist/idiot/etc!"
Give science a few hundred years, and I wouldn't be that surprised to see more people attempting to hijack the institutions for their own political gain just as has been done to religions for thousands of years.
Not to raise any hackles, but I think that a good religious mind would follow these exact philosophical (though perhaps not mathematical) steps in living a life of faith. Faith is a hypothesis, or series of hypotheses, that like any scientific hypothesis needs constant testing, verification, revision, and simplification. We start with a fundamental supposition that is forever unprovable (God exists), but subsequent research bears it out.
True faith is not opposed to this scientific model, it's parallel to it. The essential differences, and there are some, include the fact that a lot of the data you collect in religious pursuits is simply non-transferable (as it is not quantitative). Furthermore religious terms are much less-clearly defined - making religion a largely personal quest you can't leave to experts while science has a communal aspect with information sharing and building on the shoulders of giants.
All I want to get across is that there is room for the two to co-exist without any conflict whatsoever - and that genuine science and genuine faith/religion* are divergent paths from the same essential source: sincere inquisitiveness.
-stormin
(there's room here for atheism itself to be considered a faith/religion - I'm not trying to imply that genuine science is equivalent to belief in God, just that the core principles of genuine science can be applied to religous topics)
I think I'm a compulsive replier. I may need to get that examined.
You know, you just may be right about the whole anti-science thing. I hadn't really looked at it that way before.
Although I'd like to venture that I'm at least one reasonable person who has a problem with evolution. I have absolutely no religious motivation for that - I'm fine with people descending from monkeys I have no reason on earth to care if the earth is millions or thousands of years old. I just still have trouble extrapolating from genetic variations within a species to somehow getting a whole new species.
But I'm not an expert, I have a lot to learn, and I certainly have no desire to get intelligent design or creationism taught in school. I'm just concerned that the real debate is not on the merits of evolution, but for who gets the greater slice of power in society- the academic or the religious establishment (neight of which I consider a completely benign entity).
You seem a decent fellow, If you are wrong, wouldn't you want to know?
Thanks for the sentiment. I'd like to think you're right. And if I am wrong then I wouuld like to know. That's why I will never respond to earnest and sincere criticism of me personally or my faith with derision or anger. I'm happy to take anything you say quite seriously. And if I'm wrong, then I sincerely hope that someone shows me so. The things I believe in are only worth caring about as long as they are true.
Now back to the idea of "why would 'God's People' ever be punished for doing the right thing?" If you find no precedent for God's people going through seriously hard times and persecution in the Bible, then you need to read it again. Start off with Job. You might want to look into Christ himself. Not only was he personally persecuted and eventually killed, but he prophesied that the world would hate his Church and its adherents.
People go through pain for a variety of reasons. Because sometimes shit happens. Because sometimes they need to grow. I actually think punishment is down on the list. I don't look at the trials of the early Mormons as punishment in general. Sometimes they screwed up and got themselves into trouble. The Haun's Mill massaccre is one example. They were told by Joseph Smith not to settle there, but they did anyway.
But a better example of the trials is Zion's Camp (I think I'm getting the name right). Essentially Joseph Smith took 300 members and marched several hundred miles in an attemtp to either reclaim land stolen from the Saints or at least get some recompense for it. The Camp was a failure. They were besest by illness the entire time, not to mention infighting, and they never got their land back or one penny for it.
Yet a member of Zion's Camp, writing years later, declared that the Camp had been a success for one essential reason: it had tried the members in the fire and made them better men and more capable rulers. The principle applies to the pioneerrs in general. Nowadays the activity rate for Mormons is around 50%. This is actually extraordinarily high for a large denomination (meanint 50% of people whose names are on the roles come to Church regularly). But what do you think the activity rate was among the early pioneers? They didn't have time for complaining that someone in the Relief Society had insulted their pot roast, or that Brother Jacobs over there had forgotten to home teach them three months in a row and so they weren't coming anymore. Their sacrifice founded a legacy of service and faith that inspires members nearly 200 years later.
Look, I'd rather not get into this any further on a public forum. I'm sure there are some people getting really pissed off at the Mormon who's proselyting on Slashdot. I know that my name is kind of wearing my heart on my sleeve, but believe ir or not I picked it because it was a joke nickname for me in college (I was one of the only Mormons on campus) and not as an avenue to "witness" to all the heathens and pagans.
If you're curious, we can take this into email. Ngivens@richmond.edu. Believe me, there's plenty more where this came from. I've debated atheists, evangelicals of various stripes, Catholics, agnostics, Muslims and materialists. I've even had to do some of that in Hungarian. Truth is that now that I'm out of college and no longer a full-time missionary either, I don't have near enough of this discussions, so if you've got something you think I haven't heard - please lay it on me.
Science attempts to build a model of the universe based on observation.
Why observation? Why not imagination? Or random chance?
The fact is that the very PROCESS of observation is rooted in assumptions that observation can tell us things about the universe around us. Without this base assumption, there would be not motivation to observe.
I'm not saying that scientists go "gee, I think I'll believe in the principle of observation today", but the fact is that logically you have to believe that your physical sense can tell you something about the world around you or you have not coherent, rational reason to observe. Furthermore, you have to believe that, in general, the future will be like the past - that there's some kind of continuity beyond our experience. Without that assumption, then drawing conclusions from our observations would be meaningless.
It's not like I'm a lone psycho out here. This is all stuff that Hegel and Kant have been through thoroughly.
You guys want to equate "science" with rational thought. But the fact of the matter is that our current conception of science is just the recent of many paradigms to come and go. It is better than previous paradigms in the sense that now we have running water and can send men to the moon - but the essential fact is that it answers questions to our satisfaction - just as previous versions of science/philosophy/relgion did so for people at that time. This idea that our science is somehow inherently superior or that our system is 100% self-correcting is foolishness. Read some Kuhn, for crying out lout. There's a whole set of studies on the philosophy of science - and I'm not even close to an expert. But to pretend that science is some kind of holy, infinitely self-perfecting system is just ludicrous.
I think the philosophical problems are worse then I outlined, not negligible as you opine.
I used casaulity as one example, but there are others. Consider Hume's contention that we have no logical reason to expect the future to be like the past. The only thing we can say is that, in the past the future was like the past. But that's hardly admissible, since it's the past now. It's not just a fun word game, there are fundamental aspects of our everdy existence that we take on faith because we have to.
Now I am not a physics expert, and I'm willing to accept what you say about the non-applicability of causality (which you can spell better than I can!) on the subatomic level. But then again, from what little I know pretty much everything gets wacky at the subatomic level.
But we can't get away from the fact that if you define faith as belief in things which are likely but which are not certain (which is what I define faith to be) then we live our entire lives, scientific or not, based on faith. How else do we escape Descartes solipsism?
First of all, the Mountain Meadows Massacre was a tragic event, and not one that I am ignorant of. If you're going to bring it up, however, you should at least point out that then-prophet Brigham Young had expressly forbidden the Utah mormons from molesting the pioneers, and that the ringleaders of the attack were punished. There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there saying that secrtely Brigham condoned or even instigated the massacre, but most unbiased and professional historians have sided against these theories.
It's also helpful to realize that these were men who had been kicked out of New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. They had lost homes, lands, crops and possessions - watched their leaders beaten and murdered and endured the kinds of suffering no one should have to for religious belief. They had been forced to bury wives and daughters and sons in the frozen earth while they started the journey across the plains in the dead of winter. This is not to excuse what was done - and some Mormons acted violently before they had suffered this level of persecution - but to be historially honest you shoudn't equate the roque actions of Mormons after years of persecution with the almost universal and generally unprovoked persecution they had faced previously.
I will have to agree with you on some points. In general Mormons are better educated than the national average and most devout members of most religions, but the Church has instituted a largely white-washed version of its own history. While I happen to think you've picked poor examples to show the moral ambiguity of some of Mormonism's past, I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't exist. You might want to become better educated yourself on whether or not Joseph Smith "rewrote the Bible", but the heart of what you're saying is valid.
But when you say that I'm part of a culture that flourishes completely on ignorance you go to far. I'm just as aware of that quote as you are, but you should also realize that it's not the uncontested doctrine of Mormonism - it's the viewpoint of one of our leaders in contrast to a much deeper tradition that embraces not only radical freedom, but a continuing quest for personal revelation even on matters which the leaders have spoken on.
You're an outsider watching an internal argument, picking one quote that fits the stereotype you'd like to have of Mormons, and then imposing that statement on 12 million people. But the fact is you don't know what you are talking about. You can't grab a couple of anti-Mormon quotes from your local web-site and expect to understand the religion any more than I can google "Islam" and suddenly become an expert on the subject.
I'm not reacting negatively to the fact that you have negative things to say about my religion and my people. I'm reacting to the specific things you say. There are a lot of criticisms to be made about Mormon culture especially (believe me, I'm a loud critic of most things culturally Mormon) but your criticsms are superficial and largely erroneous.
-stormin
Here are some statistics:
On Eductation -
Utah ranked fourth for the highest population of persons age 25 and over with a high school degree at minimum, totaling 91 percent. (3) Utah ranked 11th for the highest population of persons age 25 and over with a bachelor's degree or higher, totaling 27.9 percent. (3) Utah ranked fifth for the highest percentage of ninth-grade students who graduated within four years, increasing from 77.8 percent in 1999 to 82.3 percent in 2000
As Latter-day Saints become more educated, they are more likely to be active Church participants, a trend opposite what is found in most denominations (online source: http://www.byuh.edu/kealakai/current/pages/educati on.html). because other Mormon quotes are "the glory of God is intelligence" and other quotes that advocate embracing truth whereever it is found
If the question is whether or not those religions that reject evolution are anti-science, I think the answer is no. They want scientific inquiry to continue, they enjoy it's benefits, and some of them are scientists. They just reserve the right to reject certain theories. It's not as though they're denying gravity or something, even reasonable and non-religious people sometimes have serious trouble with evolution.
On the other hand, if the question is are they anti-scientific, then I think the answer is arguably yes. After all, scientific inquiry is inherently boundless - it goes wherever the data lies.
I'm not an apologist for these religions. I just want to be sure that we're making the important distinctions. On the one hand we have Luther. Considered by some to be a great man of religion. I'm not so sure about that:
Slaughter them like the dogs they are.
He said this in reference to German peasents who had embraced his teachings and were using them as a basis to rebel against their feudal lords. The lords asked him what to do about it, and he responded. I think he's also the guy that, in response to an unflattering cartoon, found the culprit and crucified him upside down to a door.
So while others may look to him for spiritual guidance, I sure won't. But in contrast to Luther and to his "blind faith" theology are many creeds and religious traditions that welcome and thrive on scientific inquiry. The Jesuits are one example. Mormons, in my opinion, are another. In contrast to most religions the correlation of faithfulness is NOT inversely related to degree of education. Devout Mormons hold advanced technical degrees at a higher rate than the avg American. Questioning and doubt are core elements of Mormon theology - here's a quote from 2nd prophet Brigham Young:
If you can find a truth in heaven, earth or hell, it belongs to our doctrine. We believe it; it is ours; we claim it. Truth is all over the earth.
So all I'm trying to say is let's realize that while there are some religions that are anti-scientific, not all religions that reject evolution are. And furthermore, some religions are very welcoming of science (I relied heavily on Mormon examples because they are the most familiar to me).
Eh, I think you're overstating your case a bit. I actually agree with a great deal of what you say. The realm of the purely religious has been shrinking - at least through recorded history - while the realm of science has been growing. As far as I'm concerned, as a religous person, that's wonderful. I see no trouble at all in substituting "God makes the planets move like this" with "these are the rules of gravity that dictate how the planets move". The latter not only tells us more about planetary motion, gravity, physics etc, but I would point out that to a religious person it also tell us more about God himself. So I don't see science taking over religion so much as I see a growing overlap where one can inform the other. Science does most of the informing in terms of scientific theory, of course, but religion - for me at least - does some of the informing when it comes down to how to use science.
I hesitate to really disagree with you outright, however, because of a trouble of definition. You write:
Back to the point, though, just because someone takes advantage of scienctific knowledge (i.e. technology) does not mean that they agree with the concept of science.
I'm not really convinced that there is such a thing as a "concept of science" that is any better defined than a "concept of religion". Perhaps if you would proffer a definition of that (just a working definition) we could get somewhere.
In the meantime I'm just not quite convinced by your arguments. To my mind it seems that you are equating "science" with "reason" or "logic", and I'm not sure the two are connected at all. Some of the most fundamental aspects of science are also fundamentally irrational and illogical. Or at least a-rational and a-logical.
Consider the notion of casaulity. That principle is the basis for all scientific thought and experiment - yet there has never been and never will be any experiment that fundamentally verifies (or disproves) this theory. We just assume casaulity holds, and we go from there. I'd say that subsequent findings (the entire body of science) justify the initial assumption, but it is ironic that the fundamental assumption - which logically precedes all others even if it does not precede them chronologically - is itself inherently unscientific.
So from where I'm sitting the scientist engages in a rather subtle form of faith in his labratory. Meanwhile the religious person, as long as they evaluate the impact of evolution on their own theories (that's what their religious beliefs are, even if they don't like the term) and says "I reject it" is not being un-scientific in at least one important sense. They have what they believe is over-riding evidence that evolution MUST be false. They are making an appeal to evidence - the Bible and from then to a fundamentally unprovable assertion: the Bible is the Word of God.
But as long as science has it's fundmantal assertion (casaulity holds) I fail to see how the religious person is being utterly unscientific. It's just a question of different paradigms. And since no paradaigm can evaluate itself, neither paradigm really has ultimate logical claim over the other.
Was the library really burned by religious people? I didn't know that. Or I'd forgotten.
In any case I'm not trying to argue that religion is fundamentally good any more than science is fundamentally good. They are both fundamentally powerful (in different ways). There just seems to be a strong "world would be better without religion" sentiment on Slashdot and I'm trying to balance it out.
Yeah, pretty much. Which shows they are not anti-science. Just anti-anything science says that conlicts with their dogma. Which is not the same thing at all. There's a ton of science that doesn't conflict with religion at all - and they want their LCD and plasma TVs just as much as the next guy.
Look, saying that all of the sponsors for exhibits are corporate doesn't imply that all corporate sponsors should contribute. Who knows how hard it may or may not have been to get those corporate donors? Who knows how long they have been there?
Slashdot Mirror
Happy to help. :-)
-stormin
To give a serious response the real reasons that many of the world's poor cannot compete in world markets are:
1. Protective gov't subsidies (especially on agriculture)
2. Enabling foreign aid (You try opening an indiginous busines to sell clothing in Africa. You get to compete with all the free clothes various aid agencies dump on the market. Good luck. But at least they're not freezing to death in ethiopa now).
-stormin
I hope you were being sarcastic, but I couldn't detect any sarcasm.
Your browser must not be standards-complian. You need to upgrade. Let's test it out:
[sarcasm] No, I was being totally serious. It's better to run around half-naked killing antelopes with our bare hands. Or maybe a rock.
You see, that's the purity of it. No one controls the rock-market. I can pick one up, or you can pick one up. And if you're rock is sharper than mine, I can beat you over the head with my blunt rock and take your pointy rock. Or I can find my own pointy rock. Whatever.
The point is it's better for everyone to wear animal skins than for me to wear wrangler jeans and you to wear express jeans. [/sarcasm]
Can you hear me now?
-stormin
You're absolutely right. Poverty is a relative term. 10,000 years ago the gap between the haves and the have-nots was simply a difference in who had killed something to eat that day, and who hadn't. It was a fundamentally classless society.
But now, thanks to the free market economy, we have cars, computers, air travel, phones, TVs, the highway system, refrigerated food, and penicillin. But some people have 60" plasma TVs, and others have 27" TVs that aren't even LCD. So now we have a classed system. And since the gap between a poor person today (which in America may involved a car and a couple color TVs) and a rich person in a free-market system is wider - poverty has increased. Sure, standard of living has increased (most poor people in free market systesm don't get eaten or starve to death), but they are more poor because the free market system has created wealth that they don't have.
So the free market system is bad.
-stormin
What you say is true to an extent, but I'd point out that "physical" and "psychological" are not distinct things, just different regions along a spectrum. The guy at the gym is a good case in point. There are theories that long-distance runners get addicted to the endorphines. There you have a measurable physiological change (the endorphines), so clearly it's not just "psychological", but at the same time I'm not saying that addiction to your own endorphines is the same as addiction to heroine. You can't just neatly divide "physical" and "psychological" into two neat containers. For other examples just look at the placebo effect and the other numerous documented instances of something psychological - like mood or attitude - having a measurable effect on something physical.
Finally, the generalization about treating an illness in terms of symptoms vs. cause is also inadequate. You don't go far enough. In your example you took it back to "plaque in the arteries or whatever". But isn't that in turn just a symptom of deeper ailments? Some, like lifestyle, may be rooted in "psychological" causes. Others, like genetic predisposition, not so much. But the point is that the distinction between "symptom" and "cause" is also largely an artificial one that depends on our definition.
I deinitely think that we let pscyhologists get away with far too much - especially when they start doling out medicine of questionable effect. How much more effective are SSUI (selective seretonin uptake inhibitors) like Prozac then placebo's? The counseling? Then counseling and lifestyle coaching? Nobody knows - it's easier to take a pill than to take responsibility.
The only conclusion that we can safely draw is that the easy answers are wrong, and we have a lot more to learn about the interations between the physical and psychological before we can really make safe distinctions about addictions.
-stormin
You may think that the consequences are different but they are not
It seems to me that you contradicted this statement yourself. The social consequences are the same or similar (loosing contact with real people) but you mentioned yourself the potential of DUIs and even killing people. Maybe from your perspective there's no difference in consequence, but I'd MUCH rather have someone at home addicted to online poker or whatever than out careening through the streets with a couple thousand pounds of steel. The former may incure some slight cost to me when I have to pay via taxes for their medical support or something (assuming medicaid) the latter may kill me or my wife or someone in family. How can you possibly consider those impacts equal?
Having said that, however, I will definately say that althogh in many ways the Slashdot community is heterogenous there are a few things that we seem incapable of really honestly analyzing. #1 would be porno. Last time someone posted a book review about porno including that fact that for the past 2 - 3 decades psychological studies of humans involving pornography have been impossible to conduct because ethics boards won't allow them - many in the community went through the roof about "right-wing conspiracies" or "religious agenda" - neither of which are very closely related to college ethics boards as far as I know. The fact is that the VAST majority of Slashdot users are into porno (I know, I get the Captain Obvious award) and so messing with it is like messing with the sacred cow.
Internet addiction is similar. I love video games. I read escapist magazine regularly, and I play everything from my old SNES to the Call of Duty 2 on the 360 demo. And I've noticed that WoW has a VERY addiction-like effect on some of my friends (I don't have time to play online games so I don't even own this one). Both of my younger brothers spent inordinate amounts of time (inordinate being defined as "they didn't do anything else" and "missing work") and had some rather scary symptoms. If I got between me and my brothers fix (he used my computer a few years ago and sometimes I needed to get homework done on it) he would get extremely violent - and once or twice physically so (luckily we're the same size so I could hold my own until he realized what he Hell he was doing). The fact is that there probably is some rationalizing going on here.
Procrastination may be an old fault - but can we really pretend that having the internet handy doesn't make it (for some people at least) a lot easier? Just like child porno has been around for a long time - but before the internet far fewer people were involved (can we at least agree that that brand of porno is wrong?).
The internet is really just information. Knowledge is power. Power can be used for good and for destructive purposes. The mature thing to do is realize that and be willing to adress the issues honestly - and without going into hysterics for or against.
-stormin
And what's to stop us from switching to solid-state storage?
You can already get flash drives as big as what, 8 gig? My laptop has only 40gig HDD, and that's plenty for me. I'd go down to 20 or 30 in a flash (ha ha) if it meant switching to steady-state.
There will always be *something* that's a bottleneck, but concentrating on the bottlenecks can get you the biggest bang:buck performance increase.
-stormin
If we were really talking about the economics of P2P then we would bring in the other half. You've got revenues and you've also got cost. If P2P reduces revenue but reduces cost even greater than the profit - which is the margin between the two - will increase.
Without evaluating the effect of P2P on cost you're really not able to say anything about the economic effect of P2P at all.
-stormin
but eventually data will always beat dogma (or by definition it is not longer science).
That's fine, but you're using a narrow definition of "science". If you allow a similary narrow definition of religion, then any religion that does anything immoral or stupid is not really religion.
But in everyday language eugenics was a type of science and fundmamentalism is a type of religion.
-stormin
I don't really have an opinion on intelligent design because I don't really konw what it is. I'm not sure if they're just trotting Paley's Watch back out or what. So until I actually read some 1-st hand accounts, I just can't say anything about it.
As for materialism, I clearly disagree with you there, but respectfully so. And in any case that's WAY off topic and I don't really have the time to tackle a whole new issue!
Still, it's always nice when I can disagree with people while maintaining mutual respect.
-stormin
Of course it's based on an assumption.
That's really all I'm trying to get across. Science is based on fundamentally unprovable assumptions (or at least one).
Look, my real thesis here is simple. I think that the dichotomy between "religion" and "science" is a false one. The truth is that you have both sincere and domatic religion, and you have both sincere and dogmatic science. But neither religion nor science are of necessity fundamentally dogmatic or sincere.
I'm not saying they are the same either. Just that they a - overlap, and b - are based on similar reasoning. Sincere science is based on starting with an unprovable assumption and making observations and experiments to attempt to increase knowledge of things that can be quantified. It's a communal process because quantifiable information can be communicated without loss of data. Thus scientific progress involves co-operation, standing on the shoulders of giants, and the realm of science grows from geneation to generation.
Religion, of the sincere type, is based on taking another unprobavable assumption and living a life designed to test, develop, and refine religious hypotheses. The difference is that religious "data" is generally non-quantifiable and non-reproducible. There can be some communcation and sharing, but it's an inherently personal process. You can teach someone calculus, but you can't teach someone religion in the same sense. You can teach them about religion, but that's not the same thing. Thus, while there is a communal aspect to religion, you can't really stand on the shoulders of giants you have to do it on your own, and the sphere of sincere religion is, in my opinion, static.
Dogmatic religion is a parasite. When you have a bunch of people who believe in God, and who believe in doing what God says, you have a source of tremendous power. If you can corrupt sincere faith (which is just drawing conclusions based on insufficient data because, as you mentioned, there's no better way) into a bastardized version of faith (which says you just affirm principles based on sheer will power) then you can use dogmatic faith to get religious people to do whatever you tell them too. The temptation to replace the sincere faith with the dogmatic faith is poweful, the two concepts are similar, and the effects can be seen throughout history. Masses of people supporting leaders for political gain in the name of God. Dogmatic religion is the opiate of the masses, I would say. It fulfills a societal need by helping people deal with a primal fear of the unknown, of death, and by being used to answer moral dilemnas. Feel guilty? By indulgences. It survives not on any rational basis but on a claim to authority (The Bible tells me so! or The Koran tells me so! or just God tells me so!)
But religion has been around for 1,000s of years. Science, as an independent institution, is relatively new. And I already see signs that it can be hijacked in similar ways. Just take a look at eugenics (especially in Nazi Germany). That was a parasitic use of corruped scientific research to yield greater political power. Sure, that wasn't "real" science, but blowing people up in Iraq isn't real religion either.
Furthermore, scientific institutions now replace some religious institutions in fulfilling social roles. Afriad of dying? You used to pray to God, dream of heaveen, or some such religious work-around. Now? You can dream of immortality, or at least prolonged youth thanks to science. As a result, the immense power latent in religious institutions is now being gradually transferred to academic and scientific institutions. Dogmatic science even perpetuates itself in the exact same way as religion. If God really talks to you, then it's probably a good reason for people to listen. Similarly, if you've actually spent years of your life in intense study of science, you probably have valuable insights that may be applied to other areas. But the second someone says "God talked to me therefore
This could not happen if Kuhn's theory was correct.
I think you must be working with a drastically oversimplified version of Kuhn's theory.
Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition. - Kuhn
Kuhn believed, and I'm trying to remember this off the top of my head, that science depicts itself as a kind of onward-marching juggernaut progressively accumulating and refining knowledge. His contention was that in actual fact, scientific "progress" is often far more sporadic, and involves far more false starts and failures and abandoned avenues, then the glosses we get in science text books (which tend to give the impression that scientific progress has been a historic inevitability). You seem to have the same rosey view of science as these text-books. That science is fundamentally unchanged and will always correct its own errors as time goes by. The fact that some theories have been overthrown within the context of a continuous scientific tradition is utterly insufficient to prove Kuhn's theory.
Kuhn believed that science consisted in answering questions - and that the methodology we used to answer those questions, and the questions we considered answerable, depended on the paradigm in which we were operating. The paradigm itself is not subject to the kind of continuous, one-dimensional progress you think it is. Paradigms come and go in revolutions that overthrow not specific theories but the very nature of the questions we seek to answer and the avenues we see as open to answering those questions.
I'll be honest, I'm rusty on this and it's not an area of my expertise. I know enough to know that your out-of-hand dismissal of Kuhn is unwarranted, but I do not know enough to mount any more of a defense than what I've got here at this time.
In closing, it's those paradigms, the fundamental questions science believes it can answer, than I believe rest largely on unquestioned assumptions. But I need to do more research before I can bring more to bear than this, so I'm just going to have to do my best to gracefully exit the discussion at this point.
- stormin
Some Mormons believe that. And it is not scientific. But it's not part of the religion, just the culture. It's not required of all members that they become either theologians or historians, but among those Mormons who are the belief was pretty much debunked by Sorensen many years ago when he pointed out that the Book of Mormon most likely took place within a region only a couple hundred miles wide and long - not over the entire South and Central American continent. So even before the blood testing came out there was really no reason to believe this anyway. It's a straw man.
People should really learn to do two things before they impose "Mormon" beliefs on me in an effort to score rhetorical points.
1 - Check to see if the belief is even really Mormon at all.
2 - Look up the logical fallacy of "poisoning the well". Even if I did believe that, or some other non-scientific tidbit, that wouldn't be sufficient to disprove my points - only to make me look bad. Which are you trying to do?
-stormin
Certainly not all religion fosters literacy! That should go without saying. I was just pointing out that some religions do.
But I would contend that there are two broad types of religion: the sincere and the purely domatic. The purely dogmatic is pretty much arbitrary in its beliefs and requires adherents to surrender their own thoughts and opinions and simply believe (where belief is defined as merely using sheer will power on a belief - kind of like the sumo wrestling of wishful thinking). But there is another type of religious thought: the type that in its sincerity requires adherents (of either a conventional organized religion or free-thinkers) to evaluate, question, and doubt. Obediance in this context, while superficially identical, is fundamentally different because it is obediance informed by prior, reasoned belief. Kind of like trusting someone you know vs. doing whatever anyone tells you. Belief in those religions is of the conventional, rational sense - drawing conclusions from frequently insufficient data with full awareness that the data is insufficient.
I would also go further and say that those exact principles can be applied to science as well. There are plenty of dogmatic scientists. Even mathematicians have occaisionally been dogmatic throughout history. This isn't to say that science is inherently dogmatic - to the extent that they were dogmatic they were rejecting the real principles of science as we accept them today. True science is not dogmatic.
The only reason that religion is not equated with reason and rational thought is that there's a very, very long history of substituting one definition of belief for the other. This is a subtle change that requires adherents to obey without thinking and allows religious leaders to convert piety into political capital. They no longer get to evaluate their leaders, or even their religion itself, before swearing allegiance to it - allowing anyone to take over the church if they can sieze control of the hierarchy. This confusion of faith by dogma vs. faith as sincere belief continues in mainstream churches today and is institutionally embraced by some religions - thus leading to the (partially deserved) bad reputation of religion in general.
Meanwhile science continues to institutionally reject dogma for the most part. I'd say some arguably scientific institions like the AMA and the pyschiatric equivalent are just as dogmatic on some issues for political reasons. It may even be worth pointing out that science, as we understand it today, is much newer than religion. It already starts to make appeals to authority in some cases. This mirrors religious abuse. "Listen to me, because God gave me authority and thus you MUST believe or be a heretic!" is not that different from "Listen to me, because I have a PhD and therefore you MUST believe or be a fundamentalist/idiot/etc!"
Give science a few hundred years, and I wouldn't be that surprised to see more people attempting to hijack the institutions for their own political gain just as has been done to religions for thousands of years.
-stormin
Excellent post, should be modded +5 informative.
Not to raise any hackles, but I think that a good religious mind would follow these exact philosophical (though perhaps not mathematical) steps in living a life of faith. Faith is a hypothesis, or series of hypotheses, that like any scientific hypothesis needs constant testing, verification, revision, and simplification. We start with a fundamental supposition that is forever unprovable (God exists), but subsequent research bears it out.
True faith is not opposed to this scientific model, it's parallel to it. The essential differences, and there are some, include the fact that a lot of the data you collect in religious pursuits is simply non-transferable (as it is not quantitative). Furthermore religious terms are much less-clearly defined - making religion a largely personal quest you can't leave to experts while science has a communal aspect with information sharing and building on the shoulders of giants.
All I want to get across is that there is room for the two to co-exist without any conflict whatsoever - and that genuine science and genuine faith/religion* are divergent paths from the same essential source: sincere inquisitiveness.
-stormin
(there's room here for atheism itself to be considered a faith/religion - I'm not trying to imply that genuine science is equivalent to belief in God, just that the core principles of genuine science can be applied to religous topics)
I think I'm a compulsive replier. I may need to get that examined.
You know, you just may be right about the whole anti-science thing. I hadn't really looked at it that way before.
Although I'd like to venture that I'm at least one reasonable person who has a problem with evolution. I have absolutely no religious motivation for that - I'm fine with people descending from monkeys I have no reason on earth to care if the earth is millions or thousands of years old. I just still have trouble extrapolating from genetic variations within a species to somehow getting a whole new species.
But I'm not an expert, I have a lot to learn, and I certainly have no desire to get intelligent design or creationism taught in school. I'm just concerned that the real debate is not on the merits of evolution, but for who gets the greater slice of power in society- the academic or the religious establishment (neight of which I consider a completely benign entity).
-stormin
You seem a decent fellow, If you are wrong, wouldn't you want to know?
Thanks for the sentiment. I'd like to think you're right. And if I am wrong then I wouuld like to know. That's why I will never respond to earnest and sincere criticism of me personally or my faith with derision or anger. I'm happy to take anything you say quite seriously. And if I'm wrong, then I sincerely hope that someone shows me so. The things I believe in are only worth caring about as long as they are true.
Now back to the idea of "why would 'God's People' ever be punished for doing the right thing?" If you find no precedent for God's people going through seriously hard times and persecution in the Bible, then you need to read it again. Start off with Job. You might want to look into Christ himself. Not only was he personally persecuted and eventually killed, but he prophesied that the world would hate his Church and its adherents.
People go through pain for a variety of reasons. Because sometimes shit happens. Because sometimes they need to grow. I actually think punishment is down on the list. I don't look at the trials of the early Mormons as punishment in general. Sometimes they screwed up and got themselves into trouble. The Haun's Mill massaccre is one example. They were told by Joseph Smith not to settle there, but they did anyway.
But a better example of the trials is Zion's Camp (I think I'm getting the name right). Essentially Joseph Smith took 300 members and marched several hundred miles in an attemtp to either reclaim land stolen from the Saints or at least get some recompense for it. The Camp was a failure. They were besest by illness the entire time, not to mention infighting, and they never got their land back or one penny for it.
Yet a member of Zion's Camp, writing years later, declared that the Camp had been a success for one essential reason: it had tried the members in the fire and made them better men and more capable rulers. The principle applies to the pioneerrs in general. Nowadays the activity rate for Mormons is around 50%. This is actually extraordinarily high for a large denomination (meanint 50% of people whose names are on the roles come to Church regularly). But what do you think the activity rate was among the early pioneers? They didn't have time for complaining that someone in the Relief Society had insulted their pot roast, or that Brother Jacobs over there had forgotten to home teach them three months in a row and so they weren't coming anymore. Their sacrifice founded a legacy of service and faith that inspires members nearly 200 years later.
Look, I'd rather not get into this any further on a public forum. I'm sure there are some people getting really pissed off at the Mormon who's proselyting on Slashdot. I know that my name is kind of wearing my heart on my sleeve, but believe ir or not I picked it because it was a joke nickname for me in college (I was one of the only Mormons on campus) and not as an avenue to "witness" to all the heathens and pagans.
If you're curious, we can take this into email. Ngivens@richmond.edu. Believe me, there's plenty more where this came from. I've debated atheists, evangelicals of various stripes, Catholics, agnostics, Muslims and materialists. I've even had to do some of that in Hungarian. Truth is that now that I'm out of college and no longer a full-time missionary either, I don't have near enough of this discussions, so if you've got something you think I haven't heard - please lay it on me.
I'll be waiting to hear it.
-stormin
Science makes no such fundamental assertion.
Really?
Science attempts to build a model of the universe based on observation.
Why observation? Why not imagination? Or random chance?
The fact is that the very PROCESS of observation is rooted in assumptions that observation can tell us things about the universe around us. Without this base assumption, there would be not motivation to observe.
I'm not saying that scientists go "gee, I think I'll believe in the principle of observation today", but the fact is that logically you have to believe that your physical sense can tell you something about the world around you or you have not coherent, rational reason to observe. Furthermore, you have to believe that, in general, the future will be like the past - that there's some kind of continuity beyond our experience. Without that assumption, then drawing conclusions from our observations would be meaningless.
It's not like I'm a lone psycho out here. This is all stuff that Hegel and Kant have been through thoroughly.
You guys want to equate "science" with rational thought. But the fact of the matter is that our current conception of science is just the recent of many paradigms to come and go. It is better than previous paradigms in the sense that now we have running water and can send men to the moon - but the essential fact is that it answers questions to our satisfaction - just as previous versions of science/philosophy/relgion did so for people at that time. This idea that our science is somehow inherently superior or that our system is 100% self-correcting is foolishness. Read some Kuhn, for crying out lout. There's a whole set of studies on the philosophy of science - and I'm not even close to an expert. But to pretend that science is some kind of holy, infinitely self-perfecting system is just ludicrous.
-stormin
I think the philosophical problems are worse then I outlined, not negligible as you opine.
I used casaulity as one example, but there are others. Consider Hume's contention that we have no logical reason to expect the future to be like the past. The only thing we can say is that, in the past the future was like the past. But that's hardly admissible, since it's the past now. It's not just a fun word game, there are fundamental aspects of our everdy existence that we take on faith because we have to.
Now I am not a physics expert, and I'm willing to accept what you say about the non-applicability of causality (which you can spell better than I can!) on the subatomic level. But then again, from what little I know pretty much everything gets wacky at the subatomic level.
But we can't get away from the fact that if you define faith as belief in things which are likely but which are not certain (which is what I define faith to be) then we live our entire lives, scientific or not, based on faith. How else do we escape Descartes solipsism?
-stormin
First of all, the Mountain Meadows Massacre was a tragic event, and not one that I am ignorant of. If you're going to bring it up, however, you should at least point out that then-prophet Brigham Young had expressly forbidden the Utah mormons from molesting the pioneers, and that the ringleaders of the attack were punished. There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there saying that secrtely Brigham condoned or even instigated the massacre, but most unbiased and professional historians have sided against these theories.
It's also helpful to realize that these were men who had been kicked out of New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. They had lost homes, lands, crops and possessions - watched their leaders beaten and murdered and endured the kinds of suffering no one should have to for religious belief. They had been forced to bury wives and daughters and sons in the frozen earth while they started the journey across the plains in the dead of winter. This is not to excuse what was done - and some Mormons acted violently before they had suffered this level of persecution - but to be historially honest you shoudn't equate the roque actions of Mormons after years of persecution with the almost universal and generally unprovoked persecution they had faced previously.
I will have to agree with you on some points. In general Mormons are better educated than the national average and most devout members of most religions, but the Church has instituted a largely white-washed version of its own history. While I happen to think you've picked poor examples to show the moral ambiguity of some of Mormonism's past, I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't exist. You might want to become better educated yourself on whether or not Joseph Smith "rewrote the Bible", but the heart of what you're saying is valid.
But when you say that I'm part of a culture that flourishes completely on ignorance you go to far. I'm just as aware of that quote as you are, but you should also realize that it's not the uncontested doctrine of Mormonism - it's the viewpoint of one of our leaders in contrast to a much deeper tradition that embraces not only radical freedom, but a continuing quest for personal revelation even on matters which the leaders have spoken on.
You're an outsider watching an internal argument, picking one quote that fits the stereotype you'd like to have of Mormons, and then imposing that statement on 12 million people. But the fact is you don't know what you are talking about. You can't grab a couple of anti-Mormon quotes from your local web-site and expect to understand the religion any more than I can google "Islam" and suddenly become an expert on the subject.
I'm not reacting negatively to the fact that you have negative things to say about my religion and my people. I'm reacting to the specific things you say. There are a lot of criticisms to be made about Mormon culture especially (believe me, I'm a loud critic of most things culturally Mormon) but your criticsms are superficial and largely erroneous.
-stormin
Here are some statistics:
On Eductation -
Utah ranked fourth for the highest population of persons age 25 and over with a high school degree at minimum, totaling 91 percent. (3)
Utah ranked 11th for the highest population of persons age 25 and over with a bachelor's degree or higher, totaling 27.9 percent. (3)
Utah ranked fifth for the highest percentage of ninth-grade students who graduated within four years, increasing from 77.8 percent in 1999 to 82.3 percent in 2000
As Latter-day Saints become more educated, they are more likely to be active Church participants, a trend opposite what is found in most denominations (online source: http://www.byuh.edu/kealakai/current/pages/educati on.html). because other Mormon quotes are "the glory of God is intelligence" and other quotes that advocate embracing truth whereever it is found
If the question is whether or not those religions that reject evolution are anti-science, I think the answer is no. They want scientific inquiry to continue, they enjoy it's benefits, and some of them are scientists. They just reserve the right to reject certain theories. It's not as though they're denying gravity or something, even reasonable and non-religious people sometimes have serious trouble with evolution.
On the other hand, if the question is are they anti-scientific, then I think the answer is arguably yes. After all, scientific inquiry is inherently boundless - it goes wherever the data lies.
I'm not an apologist for these religions. I just want to be sure that we're making the important distinctions. On the one hand we have Luther. Considered by some to be a great man of religion. I'm not so sure about that:
Slaughter them like the dogs they are.
He said this in reference to German peasents who had embraced his teachings and were using them as a basis to rebel against their feudal lords. The lords asked him what to do about it, and he responded. I think he's also the guy that, in response to an unflattering cartoon, found the culprit and crucified him upside down to a door.
So while others may look to him for spiritual guidance, I sure won't. But in contrast to Luther and to his "blind faith" theology are many creeds and religious traditions that welcome and thrive on scientific inquiry. The Jesuits are one example. Mormons, in my opinion, are another. In contrast to most religions the correlation of faithfulness is NOT inversely related to degree of education. Devout Mormons hold advanced technical degrees at a higher rate than the avg American. Questioning and doubt are core elements of Mormon theology - here's a quote from 2nd prophet Brigham Young:
If you can find a truth in heaven, earth or hell, it belongs to our doctrine. We believe it; it is ours; we claim it. Truth is all over the earth.
So all I'm trying to say is let's realize that while there are some religions that are anti-scientific, not all religions that reject evolution are. And furthermore, some religions are very welcoming of science (I relied heavily on Mormon examples because they are the most familiar to me).
-stormin
Eh, I think you're overstating your case a bit. I actually agree with a great deal of what you say. The realm of the purely religious has been shrinking - at least through recorded history - while the realm of science has been growing. As far as I'm concerned, as a religous person, that's wonderful. I see no trouble at all in substituting "God makes the planets move like this" with "these are the rules of gravity that dictate how the planets move". The latter not only tells us more about planetary motion, gravity, physics etc, but I would point out that to a religious person it also tell us more about God himself. So I don't see science taking over religion so much as I see a growing overlap where one can inform the other. Science does most of the informing in terms of scientific theory, of course, but religion - for me at least - does some of the informing when it comes down to how to use science.
I hesitate to really disagree with you outright, however, because of a trouble of definition. You write:
Back to the point, though, just because someone takes advantage of scienctific knowledge (i.e. technology) does not mean that they agree with the concept of science.
I'm not really convinced that there is such a thing as a "concept of science" that is any better defined than a "concept of religion". Perhaps if you would proffer a definition of that (just a working definition) we could get somewhere.
In the meantime I'm just not quite convinced by your arguments. To my mind it seems that you are equating "science" with "reason" or "logic", and I'm not sure the two are connected at all. Some of the most fundamental aspects of science are also fundamentally irrational and illogical. Or at least a-rational and a-logical.
Consider the notion of casaulity. That principle is the basis for all scientific thought and experiment - yet there has never been and never will be any experiment that fundamentally verifies (or disproves) this theory. We just assume casaulity holds, and we go from there. I'd say that subsequent findings (the entire body of science) justify the initial assumption, but it is ironic that the fundamental assumption - which logically precedes all others even if it does not precede them chronologically - is itself inherently unscientific.
So from where I'm sitting the scientist engages in a rather subtle form of faith in his labratory. Meanwhile the religious person, as long as they evaluate the impact of evolution on their own theories (that's what their religious beliefs are, even if they don't like the term) and says "I reject it" is not being un-scientific in at least one important sense. They have what they believe is over-riding evidence that evolution MUST be false. They are making an appeal to evidence - the Bible and from then to a fundamentally unprovable assertion: the Bible is the Word of God.
But as long as science has it's fundmantal assertion (casaulity holds) I fail to see how the religious person is being utterly unscientific. It's just a question of different paradigms. And since no paradaigm can evaluate itself, neither paradigm really has ultimate logical claim over the other.
-stormin
Was the library really burned by religious people? I didn't know that. Or I'd forgotten.
In any case I'm not trying to argue that religion is fundamentally good any more than science is fundamentally good. They are both fundamentally powerful (in different ways). There just seems to be a strong "world would be better without religion" sentiment on Slashdot and I'm trying to balance it out.
-stormin
Yeah, pretty much. Which shows they are not anti-science. Just anti-anything science says that conlicts with their dogma. Which is not the same thing at all. There's a ton of science that doesn't conflict with religion at all - and they want their LCD and plasma TVs just as much as the next guy.
-stormin
Look, saying that all of the sponsors for exhibits are corporate doesn't imply that all corporate sponsors should contribute. Who knows how hard it may or may not have been to get those corporate donors? Who knows how long they have been there?
-stormin