So I guess by your logic Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy and Medical Science are all "stories" also. Perhaps we should not teach those "stories" either. Of course in twenty to thirty years it will be pretty hard to find a person to fix your car, computer, house, electrical grid, power plant, airline transportation system, military munitions, and every other thing created by scientists and engineers. Or is Evolution the only "story" that you don't want taught?
I don't think that scientists actively promote or teach atheism. What they do is debunk false arguments that religious people make for the existence of a creator. That does not mean there is not a creator, it simply means that the arguments being used to substantiate the existence of a creator are bogus. I for one am agnostic. I'm really not certain whether or not there is a creator. I am fairly certain that if there is a creator, he did not design me. God may have set up the rules of the universe and caused it to come into existence, but there is simply no evidence that god designed human beings. I am also fairly certain that the bible is a bunch of stories written by people and not the word of god. But if you happen to disagree with that, I won't take it personally. But please don't try and teach your bible stories to my children in public school.
My evidence is that a landslide majority of the world's population believes in a creator. With that and my personal spiritual experiences, I can confidently say there is a creator.
In 1400AD a landslide majority of the world's population believed that the world was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth, that everything was made up of fire, wind, water and earth, that diseases were caused by spirits or demons rather than microbes, and there are probably thousands of other examples of human ignorance that was subsequently disproven by the diligent work of scientists doing research, not by priests, ministers, or rabbis or through prayer. The MAJORITY of people in this world are wrong about lots of things. The MAJORITY of people in this world have an IQ of 100, the MAJORITY of people in this world don't have a college education.
Lots of these posts show that people simply don't understand what Steve Jobs is trying to achieve with the Apple corporation and its products. Everything about the Apple "experience" is thought out in rather minute detail. Even the packaging of an Apple product, the design, color, even smell of the box the product comes in is carefully thought out. If you really think that Steve Jobs will let OS X run on any crappy generic box you really haven't paid attention. Apple the corporation and Apple's products are a direct extension of the vision of the CEO. Jobs wants excellence and pursues it the way a great artist pursues perfection. I think some economic realities prevent him from achieving perfection sometimes (outsourcing hardware manufacturing to Taiwanese manufacturers to keep products relatively price competitive). Apple is what it is today (a multi-billion dollar boutique Hardware/Software integrator ) by choice not because of stupidity.
I for one welcome our new Chinese overlords. Didn't Kurt Vonnegut predict this in one of his novels? Galapagos maybe? He was writing about ratio between brain mass and body mass, the Chinese have the most people speaking the same language with the largest brain to body mass ratio.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to growing up because, as I understand it, I'm likely to evolve more fingers so I can type faster. Yeah, and my brain will evolve so it can transmit signals telepathically to my PC so I won't have to reach for my mouse.
Really? You have to type? God just miracles my computer on and miracles all this code into existence for me so I don't have to program at all. I just pray and give all my money to the nice church people. In the morning my car starts not because of the scientists and engineers and mechanics who built it using science and scientific principles but because god miracles it on.
I didn't mean for my observations to be in contradiction to your suggestions, they were just observations, take them any way you wish. I happen to agree with most of your suggestions. One thing that always interested me about the Taiwan system in the 1950's and 1960's is that they purposely separated out all the children with the highest test scores in the entire nation, plucked them from their hometown schools and placed them all into one special school. These students received special care and were groomed to be future government leaders. Of course the experiment failed when these kids reached college age and began to have radical ideas which threatened the very government that had nurtured them. Most of these kids left to study in America. Some have now come back to Taiwan and taken on the leadership positions they were meant to hold. In America our egalitarian society looks down upon separating kids out based on achievement or natural intellectual ability. But parents do it anyway by withdrawing their children out of public schools and sending them to expensive private schools which essentially achieves the same thing the Taiwan system was trying- creating an elite class of technocrats.
My parents were both educated in the Taiwan school systems, as were all my aunts and uncles. From their anecdotes and comments I have garnered that: (1) The Taiwanese system is far more rigorous than the US system, much more demanding. The stuff I studied in Math class in a US public high school as a sophomore was the same thing my parents studied in 7th grade in Taiwan. (2) The system churns out too many robotic, group-thinking, memorizers of raw data and does not emphasize creative thinking, problem solving, or artistic talent. Scientists, especially in the hard sciences are valued above all others.
American society must change and motivate in mass, a la the US educational system during the 60's space race with the Soviet Union. Our society is too focused on celebrity and wealth. Observe the American Idol phenomena and you'll know everything you need to know about our society's values today. Stop coddling our children, kids in Taiwan and Japan are committing suicide because of the amount of pressure the educational systems and society places on academic performance. We can afford to ratchet things up a little. Require discipline and effort while still emphasizing creativity and individuality (don't ask me how). Allow the gifted to be treated as such- give them more challenging assignments.
Well, one view is that since all humans have different brains (even identical twins' brains are different) and we perceive the world through capturing stimuli (five senses) and then our brains interpret that stimuli, each brain interpreting it differently, on some level it doesn't matter that a cat is a cat, because a cat is only what our brains tell us it is and each of our brains tells that to us differently and therefore there is no one "right" answer. And even if there conceptually was one "right" answer, none of us would ever know it because we all have this flawed, imperfect interpretation system (brain) which takes in the "right" answer and then distorts it. Haha who said a psych degree is useless?
Slashdot Mirror
So I guess by your logic Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy and Medical Science are all "stories" also. Perhaps we should not teach those "stories" either. Of course in twenty to thirty years it will be pretty hard to find a person to fix your car, computer, house, electrical grid, power plant, airline transportation system, military munitions, and every other thing created by scientists and engineers. Or is Evolution the only "story" that you don't want taught?
I don't think that scientists actively promote or teach atheism. What they do is debunk false arguments that religious people make for the existence of a creator. That does not mean there is not a creator, it simply means that the arguments being used to substantiate the existence of a creator are bogus. I for one am agnostic. I'm really not certain whether or not there is a creator. I am fairly certain that if there is a creator, he did not design me. God may have set up the rules of the universe and caused it to come into existence, but there is simply no evidence that god designed human beings. I am also fairly certain that the bible is a bunch of stories written by people and not the word of god. But if you happen to disagree with that, I won't take it personally. But please don't try and teach your bible stories to my children in public school.
My evidence is that a landslide majority of the world's population believes in a creator. With that and my personal spiritual experiences, I can confidently say there is a creator. In 1400AD a landslide majority of the world's population believed that the world was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth, that everything was made up of fire, wind, water and earth, that diseases were caused by spirits or demons rather than microbes, and there are probably thousands of other examples of human ignorance that was subsequently disproven by the diligent work of scientists doing research, not by priests, ministers, or rabbis or through prayer. The MAJORITY of people in this world are wrong about lots of things. The MAJORITY of people in this world have an IQ of 100, the MAJORITY of people in this world don't have a college education.
Republican=Fudd, Democrat=Duff
Lots of these posts show that people simply don't understand what Steve Jobs is trying to achieve with the Apple corporation and its products. Everything about the Apple "experience" is thought out in rather minute detail. Even the packaging of an Apple product, the design, color, even smell of the box the product comes in is carefully thought out. If you really think that Steve Jobs will let OS X run on any crappy generic box you really haven't paid attention. Apple the corporation and Apple's products are a direct extension of the vision of the CEO. Jobs wants excellence and pursues it the way a great artist pursues perfection. I think some economic realities prevent him from achieving perfection sometimes (outsourcing hardware manufacturing to Taiwanese manufacturers to keep products relatively price competitive). Apple is what it is today (a multi-billion dollar boutique Hardware/Software integrator ) by choice not because of stupidity.
I for one welcome our new Chinese overlords. Didn't Kurt Vonnegut predict this in one of his novels? Galapagos maybe? He was writing about ratio between brain mass and body mass, the Chinese have the most people speaking the same language with the largest brain to body mass ratio.
Really? You have to type? God just miracles my computer on and miracles all this code into existence for me so I don't have to program at all. I just pray and give all my money to the nice church people. In the morning my car starts not because of the scientists and engineers and mechanics who built it using science and scientific principles but because god miracles it on.
Iron Man vs. Dr. Doom geriatric style!
Or perhaps: I don't 'ave the power, Captain.
I didn't mean for my observations to be in contradiction to your suggestions, they were just observations, take them any way you wish. I happen to agree with most of your suggestions. One thing that always interested me about the Taiwan system in the 1950's and 1960's is that they purposely separated out all the children with the highest test scores in the entire nation, plucked them from their hometown schools and placed them all into one special school. These students received special care and were groomed to be future government leaders. Of course the experiment failed when these kids reached college age and began to have radical ideas which threatened the very government that had nurtured them. Most of these kids left to study in America. Some have now come back to Taiwan and taken on the leadership positions they were meant to hold. In America our egalitarian society looks down upon separating kids out based on achievement or natural intellectual ability. But parents do it anyway by withdrawing their children out of public schools and sending them to expensive private schools which essentially achieves the same thing the Taiwan system was trying- creating an elite class of technocrats.
My parents were both educated in the Taiwan school systems, as were all my aunts and uncles. From their anecdotes and comments I have garnered that: (1) The Taiwanese system is far more rigorous than the US system, much more demanding. The stuff I studied in Math class in a US public high school as a sophomore was the same thing my parents studied in 7th grade in Taiwan. (2) The system churns out too many robotic, group-thinking, memorizers of raw data and does not emphasize creative thinking, problem solving, or artistic talent. Scientists, especially in the hard sciences are valued above all others.
American society must change and motivate in mass, a la the US educational system during the 60's space race with the Soviet Union. Our society is too focused on celebrity and wealth. Observe the American Idol phenomena and you'll know everything you need to know about our society's values today. Stop coddling our children, kids in Taiwan and Japan are committing suicide because of the amount of pressure the educational systems and society places on academic performance. We can afford to ratchet things up a little. Require discipline and effort while still emphasizing creativity and individuality (don't ask me how). Allow the gifted to be treated as such- give them more challenging assignments.
Well, one view is that since all humans have different brains (even identical twins' brains are different) and we perceive the world through capturing stimuli (five senses) and then our brains interpret that stimuli, each brain interpreting it differently, on some level it doesn't matter that a cat is a cat, because a cat is only what our brains tell us it is and each of our brains tells that to us differently and therefore there is no one "right" answer. And even if there conceptually was one "right" answer, none of us would ever know it because we all have this flawed, imperfect interpretation system (brain) which takes in the "right" answer and then distorts it. Haha who said a psych degree is useless?
I agree with parent. Rashomon. There is no such thing as objective reality.