Raising the 'Joshua Generation'
Some of the most ardent homeschooling advocates don't just want to shape their kids. They want to reshape Canada.
HSLDA's Faris: public schools are 'designed to destroy faith.'
-
The Quiet Revolution in BC Schooling
Officials are downplaying huge changes online learning will bring.
-
In School's Out Door
Matt Hern wants alternatives to "jamming" education down children's throats.
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Unschooling
Education that unleashes the creative spirit.
[Editor's note: This week's previous excerpts from The Armageddon Factor recounted how a B.C. battle over including anti-homophobic teaching in B.C.'s public schools galvanized conservative opposition and helped speed a Bible-based education movement across the country. Its most extreme edges, visited in today's installment, include a growing number of homeschoolers who distrust government and aim to train children ready to inhabit, and run, a Canadian theocracy.]
In Canada, the home schooling movement has been growing at a rate that is difficult for authorities to ignore. In 1979, an estimated 2,000 children were being taught by their parents; today, the Home School Legal Defence Association of Canada puts that tally at 60,000 to 80,000.
While Ontario claims the largest number of homeschoolers, the movement's chief momentum is in the West, where B.C. foots the bill for home-computer costs and Alberta picks up 16 per cent of the tab for those who comply with the provincial curriculum and submit to periodic tests. As home educators like to point out, the Internet has put even the most isolated students only a keystroke away from a vast electronic library and distance-learning tutorials.
To outsiders, homeschooling numbers might seem negligible, but the movement's collective clout is no longer dismissed -- at least not since the last U.S. presidential primaries. As the results from the Republican caucuses in Iowa rolled in late one January night in 2008, pundits were astonished to discover that the key factor responsible for transforming an obscure, guitar-playing former Arkansas governor named Mike Huckabee into the upset winner was his grassroots network of fellow evangelicals in the homeschooling movement.
While once most homeschoolers were left-wing hippies who'd dropped out of the straitlaced consumer culture of the 1960s, today more than three-quarters are conservative Christians recoiling from the moral free-for-all they blame on those long-ago summers of love. According to a 2003 survey, more than 85 per cent of Canadian families who opted to homeschool their children did so in order to teach them a particular set of religious and moral beliefs.
Amy and Ryan Bromilow, two homeschoolers attending a gathering of the Ontario Christian Home Educators Connection (OCHEC) in Hamilton, Ontario, aren't reluctant to own up to that motivation. "We want to keep our children pure the way my parents wanted to keep us pure," Amy says, "and to teach them Christian values."
Homeschoolers in Harper's circle
With her flowery skirt and fortress mentality, Bromilow might seem to fit the prevailing stereotype of the homeschooler, but that profile is changing as swiftly as the country's demographics. At the OCHEC conference, a handful of women sporting Islamic headscarves push strollers through the crowd -- one reminder that Muslims now make up one of the fastest-growing segments of the movement -- and homeschooling is no longer a strictly rural phenomenon. One former bookstore manager with a gold earring glinting beneath his shaved pate could pass for any urban hipster in the downtown Hamilton neighbourhood where he and his wife have chosen to teach their two daughters.
Even some of the leading players in Stephen Harper's Ottawa have jumped on the homeschooling bandwagon. Two Conservative MPs, Ontario's Jeff Watson and Ed Komarnicki, a former president of the Saskatchewan Home Based Educators, have homeschooled their children, and one of Harper's closest friends and advisers, former Conservative Party strategist Ken Boessenkool -- a lobbyist whose clients have included Taser International -- has opted to oversee his kids' education at home in Calgary.
Still, the biggest revolution is not in the size or the makeup of the movement but its public image -- a shift summed up in the title of a 2007 Fraser Institute study, "Homeschooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream." In 1985, only 16 per cent of Canadian families approved of homeschooling, but by 2001, the number had ballooned to 41 per cent.
Some experts tie that jump to mounting disaffection with a one-size-fits-all education system, but another reason for the surge is the stratospheric test scores that homeschooled students have racked up. Research shows that children taught at home regularly outperform students from both public and private schools. Almost every Canadian university now accepts students who have been educated by their parents, as do the top addresses in the American Ivy League.
No matter how astonishing their academic achievements, homeschoolers face the assumption that they're social misfits -- shy, reclusive and inept at interacting with their peers after a life sequestered around the family hearth. In fact, one Canadian study reported the contrary: most homeschoolers were involved in at least eight outside activities a week, from church groups and field trips to sports teams.
Paul Faris, executive director of Canada's Home School Legal Defence Association, argues that students who are educated by their parents may actually be better socialized than their public-school counterparts. "They don't look at people and think, 'If you're not in my class, we have nothing in common,'" he says.
'Out to change our culture'
Not that Faris is unbiased. The oldest of seven growing up on a goat farm in southwestern Ontario, he was homeschooled himself, and insists he never felt deprived. He played on local hockey teams, went to high-school dances and won a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario, where he graduated from law school.
Now married to another homeschooled graduate, he is the new spokesman for the movement in Canada, a fervent advocate for the cause who defends families in court against overzealous social workers and lobbies for greater parental rights on Parliament Hill. As he points out, every legal clampdown on homeschoolers is provoked by the same question: "Whose child is it anyway? Is it your child or the government's?"
Intense and goateed, Faris is careful to tailor his message to his audience, as required. On the phone with me, he is cautious and low-key, downplaying his organization's Christian underpinnings and American ties. But addressing an insider crowd at the OCHEC convention, he metamorphoses into an aggressive cheerleader for a movement that some critics see as one of the most radical wings of the religious right. Listening to him, it becomes clear that he is not simply championing some homespun, do-it-yourself educational alternative -- a retreat from the rowdiness of the secular mainstream.
For Faris and his American allies, homeschooling is a political act with a profoundly subversive goal: to groom a new generation of fiercely motivated evangelical leaders capable of taking their place in society's power centres and creating a form of Bible-based government.
With their ability to think outside the box and their enforced history as self-starters, homeschoolers are perfectly positioned to become "spiritual change agents who are advancing the Kingdom of God," Faris tells the OCHEC crowd. "Homeschooling I believe is the most important movement in Canada right now," he says, "because we're out to change our culture."
'Satan in the public school system'
How do you change a culture? In the homeschooling movement, the answer comes without hesitation: one child at a time.
At the OCHEC conference Faris brandishes figures from The Barna Group, the U.S. religious right's favourite pollster, which warns that, by the end of a public-school education, 70 per cent of evangelical children will have lost their core beliefs. "You're putting your five-year-old in something that's designed to destroy his faith for six or seven hours a day," Faris says. "You think you'll counter that with what you teach him at home for an hour a night?"
If Faris's rhetoric sounds alarmist, it turns out to be only a pale Canadian imitation of that proffered by his mentors at the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) in the U.S.
"Satan has a good thing going in the public school system," wrote HSLDA's former senior counsel, Christopher Klicka, in his primer, Homeschooling: the Right Choice. One of two Americans on Faris's Canadian board until his death late last year, Klicka blamed that demonic romp on the courts which, in the name of neutrality, have "censored God and His principles" right out of the classroom.
"The future of liberty in our country and the very survival of the family may depend on our commitment to homeschooling," Klicka wrote.
The same argument has galvanized the modern homeschooling movement since the early 1960s when Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony first promoted home education as the cornerstone for reconstructing a Christian nation. Among those who latched onto Rushdoony's theories was Tim LaHaye, the San Diego pastor who was one of the key organizers of the Moral Majority. In 1980, in the midst of the Cold War, LaHaye took Rushdoony's attack on secular education a step further in Battle for the Mind, warning that liberals and humanists were waging a propaganda campaign in schools that was paving the way for a Soviet takeover.
Unlike LaHaye's later Left Behind thrillers, the book failed to make a dent on bestseller lists, but it did win one convert: a brash, born-again law student named Michael Farris -- no relation to Paul Faris -- who had turned the Washington state chapter of the Moral Majority into its largest branch. So impressed was Farris with Battle for the Mind that he became the author's protege. He landed a job as national director of Concerned Women for America, the anti-feminist lobby set up by LaHaye's wife, Beverly, and moved to the outskirts of Washington, D.C., where he and his wife, Vickie, began homeschooling their 10 kids.
But what began as a private experiment soon turned into a full-time crusade.
How the homeschooling movement was founded
In 1983, Farris founded the Home School Legal Defense Association and soon earned a reputation as a media-savvy evangelist for the cause, grabbing headlines for branding the American education system "a multi-billion-dollar inculcation machine." Taking on laws that made homeschooling illegal in 45 states, often by requiring parents to hold a teacher's certification, he turned HLSDA into one of the most effective Christian lobbies, championed by the likes of Joseph Farah, founder of the ultra-right-wing news website WorldNetDaily, who sees homeschooling as the equivalent of a Christian survivalist movement -- a choice that "denies the government school monopoly what it craves most: the minds and souls of your children."
HASLDA's coffers and membership rolls have grown from an initial 200 families to more than 82,000 and expanded to Brazil, Germany, Japan and Taiwan. In 1994, Dallas R. Miller, an Alberta lawyer and homeschooling father of five, opened a Canadian branch in Red Deer, complete with HSLDA's U.S. logo, mission statement and two of Farris' top lieutenants on its board.
A year later, Miller played a key role in a Canadian case that sent shivers through homeschoolers across the continent. In Newfoundland, a Seventh Day Adventist couple was charged with truancy for refusing to enroll their children in public schools, despite the fact that they had asked two different school boards to OK a curriculum drafted by their church. When they still refused to comply, social workers descended on their home, seizing their three kids, including a five-year-old not yet legally required to be in class, and placing them in foster care for 10 traumatizing months.
A judge finally overturned the order, but Miller later cited it as an example of bureaucracy gone wild, the sort of consequences that could arise from the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which the homeschooling movement opposed as a direct threat to parents' rights.
In Virginia, Michael Farris decided to use his homeschooling celebrity as a springboard to politics, running for the lieutenant governor's job. But in a 1993 race that commanded national attention, his rivals had no trouble painting him as an extremist, a pal of Jerry Falwell's who had once tried to ban The Wizard of Oz from schools. His political career was over before it began, but he was determined to ensure that a new generation of young evangelicals would not meet the same fate.
Welcome to Patrick Henry College
In September 2000, in a former cornfield outside Purcellville, Virginia, Farris threw open the doors to a cluster of red brick, neofederalist buildings that he christened Patrick Henry College, an elite training ground for the cream of the Christian homeschooling crop.
Financed in part by the profits from Tim LaHaye's Left Behind bestsellers, the college has been dubbed "Harvard for homeschoolers," but its goal was not merely to create a fundamentalist version of the Ivy League. Farris set out to produce a new breed of crack spiritual warriors who could take over key seats of influence in government, law, business and even Hollywood.
As he saw it, his own generation had played the role of Moses, bringing Bible believers to the brink of political power. Now, it was time for a new generation -- what he calls "the Joshua generation" -- to lead the way into the promised land, establishing a true Christian nation in Rushdoony's theocratic mold. As Farris likes to tell every class, "You are the tip of the spear."
A decade after its opening, Patrick Henry boasts a waiting list. Skeptics rolled their eyes when Farris told the New York Times that some parents expected him to churn out a new crop of Christian Supreme Court justices, but four years later, they were stunned into respectful silence when Patrick Henry's debaters beat the Oxford University team in an international mootcourt competition staged in England under British law -- a triumph they repeated the following year.
Prepared to 'take back the land'
Still, Farris's overriding goal is to groom Christian foot soldiers who will, as he euphemistically puts it, "take back the land." Students collect academic credits for working on election campaigns -- almost all of them toiling for Republicans -- and courses include hands-on instruction on how to run a politician's office and interpret polling results.
But it is the college's mandatory three-month internships in government that have turned its rolls into a farm team for Washington's right-wing power structure. In 2004, that program came to light when one sharpeyed media scribe noticed that, of 100 interns in George Bush's White House, seven were from tiny Patrick Henry, an institution so obscure that few liberals were even aware of its existence. One of those students worked as an aide to Bush's shadowy strategist, Karl Rove.
Known for their unwavering patriotism and Puritan work ethic, Patrick Henry grads have also been sought out by the military and the CIA, and dozens now work as full-time congressional aides or analysts within the bureaucracy which makes up Washington's powerful permanent village. When talking to the mainstream media, Farris downplays the implications of seeding politics and the public service with his young Christian guerillas. "The goal is not a political coup or the establishment of a new Israel," he wrote in The Joshua Generation. "It is about raising men and women of faith who, because they love God, refuse to sit silently by while their nation hates what He loves and loves what He hates."
For most Canadians, Patrick Henry College sounds like a pipe dream -- yet another product of the superior numbers and zeal of the American religious right that could never happen here. What few seem to realize is that such an institution already exists in this country, one that shares many of the same aims and access to power, and is already making its mark on Parliament Hill.
Tomorrow: BC's Trinity Western University creates an Ottawa base for the political 'Joshua generation.' ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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Fiat lux
1 year ago
"public schools are designed
"public schools are designed to destroy faith"
And a very good thing, because it is so called "faith", otherwise known as ingrained gullibility and brainwash, that leads animals into traps and the human race into history's mass murder campaigns and the self destruction of the environment, individuals and societies.
Like Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, James Watt said " When the last tree is cut, the Lord will return". So let's cut them all and be quick about it.
The biggest reason for the brainwashing of children with "faith" is the mental and physical control over them, by some ruling sector, through their lives.
We can see right now what "faith" does to people's minds in the suicide bomb attacks in some countries, between the various sects of the same religion, who have "faith" that the more people they kill, the faster they'll fly to the 7th level of heaven. .
I wonder whether Farris believes, and teaches his children, that the world was created 7,000 years ago in 6 days and the millions years old fossils, polished rocks etc have been "put there by the Lord to test our faith"? I often wonder if our own Stevie Harper does ?
How about Rapture, when the naked faithful will fly up to heaven?
Good things to teach to children and force them to use this crap in their tests to pass.
Ed Deak.
John Greg
1 year ago
The Handmaid's Tale
Atwood's dystopic fiction, The Handmaid's Tale, is precisely the kind of sick, oppressive, and profoundly distorted society that these faith-based psychopaths would create given the chance -- or of course, given whichever particular brand name the majority blindly buys into, perhaps we'll just futter off into Taliban North.
We really do need to keep our guard up and been deeply wary of and concerned with this desperate decline in wisdom and a belief in freedom of thought and the pursuit of intelligence.
Ah well, at least for now we still have Tyee. A sharp shining light in the growing shade of paranoid, conservative ideology.
Camero409
1 year ago
Freaks
These freaks must be kept from the seats of power at all costs or we are doomed. Harper and his goons are the thin edge of the wedge. These people are sick!
KWD
1 year ago
John, will choosing the brand name be that difficult?
Hmmmm, let me see: Do I become a fundamentalist Christian or an Islamic faithful? Decisions, decisions.
Do I want to spend eternity fluttering through an endless procession of fluffy white clouds, or be confronted with 72 voluptuous young virgins?
What shall I do?
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
Oh you of little faith...
You forget children, that your reason itself is born from faith - that all 'reasonable' beings descend from a love of moral behaviour, based on nothing more than an imagining that all of us act from a set of principles suggesting we perceive ourselves in others. Empathy, justice and anything but an means to an end - all the same shit.
Rawls makes a God - and Kant did it too and today, you pathetic ghouls of economic rational do nothing more than lick their boots.
You hate religion, so you put reason - and saving the forest/planet/biosphere because it makes economic sense to do so - as motive for your love of it?
Because it's "rational", or it wrecks the whole Darwin evolutionary thing if we kill ourselves?
Is that all you got?
*That's* why we shouldn't wreck the planet?
Cuz it's "bad science?"
Fuck you.
Go look at a mountain.
The Golden Rule and Kant are so closely adapted as to be almost evolutionary, were they not more deeply appreciated as purely abstract AND WHOLLY DEVISED BY US.
*WE* make morals.
*WE* hear God, or a "reasonable" self and call it the same.
When you stare at the depth of reasoning, you may discover that all stories of right living derive from an agreed proposition that to make a cohesive, principled society, we must devise those principles; with no guidance but the voices we hear in us.
Tell me your "reasonable"/secular behaviour hasn't killed a hundred million in the pursuit of 'Gross Domestic Product' - the byproduct of the science of economics, and itself the child of 'ever reasonable mathematics' - and I will call you a liar.
You self-deceiving, death-loving rationalists.
Kant (your beloved Kant) ultimately had to face the music that was religion; where he claimed that the Categorical Imperative was a law purely made as a thing unto itself - but oh gosh, he honestly wasn't talking about the Golden Rule.
His Imperative could not be broached under any circumstances - sound familiar?
Do not lie he said, under any circumstances - and defended that "law" by stating the law lay unto itself.
"Not my fault", he says, "I'm just doing my job, telling you how it is..."
Stop me when this starts to hurt.
"Because I said so", he might have well as admitted - but being enamored of his mind; and perhaps rightfully so, he fudged it. “Well, just do it anyways.”
"It'll work out."
His voice was an "Imperative" and all those other voices were "Gods".
Bullshit. Pure horseshit.
Your “reasonable” lives are ruled by *belief* - that is all we have and the best we can do.
When the fools and simpletons are done with their reason-based or religion-based utopias and believe in the catastrophic aftermath that they've killed from different wells, let the survivors know their means for what they were - weapons of the same maker that knew other voices as “collateral damage” and watched them die for their heresy.
Reasonable men and fundamentalists - same shit, different assholes.
Fuck you both.
samuidave (not verified)
1 year ago
I sense some hostility in Glen Murtz's post...
...which makes me smile. Whether one is in support of a personal or revealed god or not, we have all been given the ability to reason and, accordingly, there is no argument we should not do so as well as we can.
As for the home-schooling movement, if the general impetus is so the children can become well schooled in Christian theology to buttress their 'faith' -- which is my experience with the handful or two of kids I know who have gone through the program -- there is nothing a rational, anti-theist (like myself) can do about it.
235 years ago Thomas Paine argued in favour of God but contrary to the Church teachings in writing Common Sense and the threat of tyranny by British Imperialism. Then 160 years ago William Lloyd Garrison was fighting for the emancipation of slaves in America on the basis of non-resistance as per his interpretation of God's word. And then, this law of non-resistance based on God's word was extended to all humanity quite eloquently by Leo Tolstoy at the turn of the 19th Century, just a handful of years or two before my grandfather was born.
Now, one must ask if it is the teaching of God and/or faith that is the problem with our world? Rational thought will not solve the problems of our world, not without conscionable behaviour. One can rationalize "an eye for an eye" and charge into wars on a seemingly flimsy ground like revenge.
I think history shows us that rational thought need not be mutually exclusive of a belief in God to the extent that civility cannot be achieved while holding both ideas, even if compartmentalized.
Personally, I cannot get past the hypocrisy and fairytale fantasies of the Bible to believe it is anything more than the ravings of stone-age desert men, but that is not germane to my point of rational, conscionable behaviour.
Grumpy
1 year ago
Religious Schools......................
..............are an extremely dangerous affair. They teach religious mambo-jumbo, tarted up as fact. Intolerance, anti just about everything, religious school are just a platform to spread one's own religious cult. And cults they are, based on mysticism and religious speak history.
And the taxpayer pays for this crap?
Booker
1 year ago
Hypocrites
While they attack and try to destroy secular government, they shamelessly suck on the government teat and lobby politicians to divert tax dollars to support their religion and their propaganda machine. Cut them loose, or start government funding of humanist, atheist, and ant-religious organizations too.
dorothy
1 year ago
Thanks, Ed!
I would write a letter to this, but can't say it any better than you have done. I love your straight honest talk. Thanks again!
lemonheart
1 year ago
No funding....
None of these "schools" should be funded by taxpayers at all, ever. Have a bake sale or something.
Santa Claus and God are one and the same and beget the same response : I won't take a word you say seriously. You have just told me to my face that you believe in the Invisible Man.
Apart from being a control mechanism, is religion just a response to the difficult to face fact that ones life is really no more important than a grain of sand down at Jerich Beach?
The history of humanity - and this is the best we can do? Really?
Do people just think waaaaaaay too highly of themselves?
Chris H
1 year ago
Home schooled kids that return to the classroom.
Sometimes, from my experience, teachers get a student enrolled in their classroom that has only been home schooled. They are often way behind in certain subjects ... suprisingly, often Math. It usually doesn't take that long for them to "fit in" socially. This would be an interesting line of inquiry.
The young earth christians are a scary bunch, however, they seem to be able to throw all their beliefs in the garbage when pursuing their dreams. Look at Stockwell Day ... you won't hear him talking about his belief that people walked around with dinosaurs.
lynn
1 year ago
Loved your post, Glen Murtz.
Quote:
"Your “reasonable” lives are ruled by *belief* - that is all we have and the best we can do.
When the fools and simpletons are done with their reason-based or religion-based utopias and believe in the catastrophic aftermath that they've killed from different wells, let the survivors know their means for what they were - weapons of the same maker that knew other voices as “collateral damage” and watched them die for their heresy."
lynn
1 year ago
And this....Glen Murtz , was sheer poetry:
"You hate religion, so you put reason - and saving the forest/planet/biosphere because it makes economic sense to do so - as motive for your love of it?
Because it's "rational", or it wrecks the whole Darwin evolutionary thing if we kill ourselves?
Is that all you got?
*That's* why we shouldn't wreck the planet?
Cuz it's "bad science?"
Fuck you.
Go look at a mountain."
jimorsheryl
1 year ago
Fiat......
"Good things to teach to children and force them to use this crap in their tests to pass. "
Better to teach them that man came from nothing and will return to nothing, as per Darwin's theory??? Then wonder why thinking people, can see no purpose for this existence at all??
You clearly, have never heard the True Gospel of Christianity. It is not crap, unfortunately Christians have their share of nut cases also, but that is not exclusive to Christians.
Those who poo poo the 'faith' of Christians have decided to put their faith into so-called science instead.
To claim that Darwin is right that there is no God, is absolute folly, in the highest degree.
There is a vast number of genuine scientists who do believe in the literal creation as told in the Bible, but I doubt your closed mind would consider what they have to say on the matter. They can hold their own in a debate with anyone, and they are arguing from science, not the Bible to prove the earth is not any older than the Bible says it is.
jimorsheryl
1 year ago
Booker ....
"While they attack and try to destroy secular government, they shamelessly suck on the government teat and lobby politicians to divert tax dollars to support their religion and their propaganda machine. Cut them loose, or start government funding of humanist, atheist, and ant-religious organizations too."
You do realize that the education system sucks at the government teat don't you? Can you imagine a more humanist, atheist and anti-religious organization than the public school system.
A Voice
1 year ago
What one has to remember is
What one has to remember is faith does teach the basic tenements of leading a good and honest life.
Only when there are individuals vying for greater power do we see these basic teachings perversed. I speak of all faiths. Not all Muslims are suicide bombers and fanatics, nor are all good Christians rightwing conservative wackos (I personally know of way too many rightwing and leftwing wackos without any faith at all) Everything in moderation. If you want schooling to teach moral and social values, instead of parents, then the public school system is working for you, if you believe these issues should be taught at home, then the public school system has definately over stepped it's boundries. This is why there is a big push away from the public school system for many. In this great nanny state we reside in, there are too many individuals who do not want to take responsibility, instead handing it to the govenment to guide them along the way, instead of allowing individual behaviours to weed out the weak and ineffective members of our society. As far as funding to private schooling, then maybe these patents dont have to pay school tax and fund them selves?
You can't have it both ways.
Chris Keam
1 year ago
Darwin
"To claim that Darwin is right that there is no God, is absolute folly, in the highest degree."
Darwin made no such claim and was at his core, a Christian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#Religious_views
Booker
1 year ago
jimorsheryl
And since it's a government branch, how is that hypocritical?
Yes, I can imagine an actual humanist, atheist or antireligious organization. The public education system is none of those, but it contains people who are those things as well as people who are thoroughly religious, from the orthodox to the New Age. It is diverse in its makeup, like the public it serves.
John Greg
1 year ago
Here we go again
jimorsheryl said:
Actually, to clarify, most thinking people tend to find a great deal of purpose in day-to-day existence, including intellectual exploration, discovery of the real universe, determining cause in such mysterious human behaviours as believing in the thoroughly unprovable and utterly fantastic as though it were real, etc., etc., etc. And yes, it is far, far better to teach them the known facts of evolution, rather than the thin make-believe of invisible pink flying dragons, or magical sky daddys who would rather rip you to shreds, drown you in perpetual flame, and curse you to an eternity of unendurable pain for the simple act of disbelief in their unprovable yet terrible might.
jimorsheryl said:
This is predicated on that great leap of ignorance that all faith-based persons make in their thorough, complete, and ceaselessly mystifying misunderstanding of what science is. Science is not a faith-based system of belief. Science is a method of describing the known universe, and through experimentation postulating on possible causes, unknown phenomenoa, and much, much more.
Science does not say "Such and such is fact because I say it is."
Rather, science says "Such and such might be fact, so I will now set out to disprove it; if I fail to disprove it, and if others using even more exacting standards of experimentation fail to disprove it, then yes, it probably is fact."
Faith says, unequivocabley, "Such and such is fact simply because I (and my invisible pink flying dragon Bert) say it is; if you disagree with me you are a blasphemer, a traitor, a heretic, and should be silenced with as much vigour and prejudice as I can muster."
jimorsheryl said:
Lastly, jimorsheryl, that is simply bullshit. Nothing more; nothing less. Utter and complete Bullshit. There is a vanishingly small number of so-called scientists who believe the bible is literal fact, and for the most part those scientists are in fact charlatans, or have earned such scientific degrees as they claim to own from a biblical college or some such other non-science entity. Basically, you are talking out of a vacuuously empty hat -- but don't let me confuse you with the science of the vacuum.
John Greg
1 year ago
Angry Murtzs and other Flying Buttresses
I won't bother commenting on the utter foolishness of Murtz's (and by association lynn's) rhetorical bombast beyond saying that he too, like so many angry non-thinkers, utterly confuses, or is simply unaware of the difference between a faith-based system of belief, and the science of experimentation, explanation, and postulations of reality based on known, provable data.
Chris H
1 year ago
Everybody pays taxes for schools
Everybody pays taxes for schools, regardless whether they have children or not. Just as we have a publically funded healthcare system that everyone can access and is paid for with tax dollars we have a publically funded school system that all children can access. If you choose to opt out of either system, why should the taxpayer pay for that? Private, independent schools are all about discriminating. They can pick and choose who they take and who they don't. Why would we have tax dollars support that?
Irish8th
1 year ago
Generalizing
It's absurd to slide home learners into one box, either positive or negative. Like all kids in private and public schools, home learners are neither more socially astute or less, brighter or slower, etc. Obviously, the religious groups have other motives.
We schooled our kids at home for many years after the public system failed us miserably. We wanted to support it and we still do, but we couldn't watch our kids flounder and suffer, nor could we afford private. What else to do but teach them at home.
Meeting other home learners made me realize that they're as varied as the traditional school population. If socially awkward kids who have been home schooled enter the traditional system, everyone points to home learning as the culprit; socially inept kids who haven't been home learners are just plain, old socially inept.
We didn't keep our kids in the basement like bottled fruit and we taught all skills required to re-enter school at any time. The only downside of home schooling for us, was that it was hard to find community, as the educational philosophies and directives between families are often at odds.
This article is wonderfully informative, though provides more information on the high-jacking of young minds by withdrawing them from popular culture than it does on the value and worth of homeschooling.
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
Mr. John Greg
Science is not a moral or ethical system.
It can never claim to be one.
Heck - one of medicine’s first steps was to provide itself an ethical backdrop - that’s how nasty that shit you call science can be.
(look up Hippocratic Oath Mr. Greg, for a handy-dandy cheat sheet on the problem I’m about to lay out for you)
Science claims genealogy in the tree of Reason.
And yet strangely, Reason *does* claim to give us moral and ethical guidelines on how to live.
How can this be?
How can a method of consideration which claims descent from an ethical or moral code steadfastly insist that it’s very essence comes from lacking those?
Golly. That could be pretty dangerous right?
So what should we do?
Ahhhhhhh - we can graft ethics onto it.
Do this. Don’t do that.
But now, hang on, wait! - haven't we changed it?
Isn't "ethical" scientific endeavor now just a crippled version of itself?
Besides - pay attention Mr. Greg - what is “ethical” anyways?
Who gets to decide that? Are some ethics better than others? Who says? And mostly - Why?
The point is that unless science comes to Reason and begs for definitions on “right” behaviour, it doesn’t know good from bad. And it knows it.
We have to “help” it by choosing certain values over others.
And those values - watch carefully Mr. Greg - come from *belief*.
So we slap together some version of what is “good” and apply it our little beggar and voila!
Once we've done that, according to reasonable arguments, we can then disagree on whether faith and science are at odds. Because all along, Faith lends us ways of understanding how to *be*.
Now that I've explained the problem to you, perhaps you can grow a pair and admit that Science provides nothing to say on belief (as opposed to Reason or Faith).
Science has nothing to do with the problem.
You’re shaking your money maker at the wrong party dude.
The issue is with "Reason".
G West
1 year ago
Ah but...
Reason has NOTHING to do with Faith. And there's the rub.
Religion relies upon the application of faith - not a demonstration of empirical evidence...and that's why, in the end, science and religion have diverged from what was a common ancestor.
CanadianLatitude
1 year ago
Man oh man we are going
Man oh man we are going backwards..... So much for intelligent life on this planet when most just live by superstition...
Booker
1 year ago
Dude...with a capital D
Science doesn't know good from bad; people do. Geometry doesn't know good from bad; peoples do. Calculus doesn't know good from bad; people do. If we are going to use eighteenth-century initial caps, Reason is what Faith f*cks up.
alvin54
1 year ago
flounder?
Irish8th: Can you explain how your children floundered hopelessly? By the way, the word is founder.
Bob Watts
1 year ago
GOD-DOG--OMG-GMO---WTF?
Pollution caused by over population is killing this planet, and every religious group is trying their best to out breed each other!
Great a new generation of dumb-ass, homophobic, bigots. Guess it’s OK if they are bred to work for nothing and wait for their reward in the next life…..hey wasn’t that the idea behind residential schools…praise Jesus yes!
Bob Watts
1 year ago
Sorry!
I spent eight years at a Christian Boys School. WOW am I so not a conservative and neither was Jesus in so many ways!
John Greg
1 year ago
Murtz
I am sorry, but do you have a meaningful, or even slightly comprehensible point in all that contradictory, off-topic gibberish?
CanadianLatitude
1 year ago
To claim that Darwin is
To claim that Darwin is right that there is no God, is absolute folly, in the highest degree.
============
What about the gods that were around long before Christianity? Greek, Norse mythology had floods too, the Jesus myth could be ripped off a number of other dieties,
How do you rationalise the contridictions just in genesis alone?
The earth 6000 years old? lol
CanadianLatitude
1 year ago
What one has to remember is
What one has to remember is faith does teach the basic tenements of leading a good and honest life.
=================
Such as? Killing women who are not virgins on wedding night? Killing mis behaving kids? killing non believers? etc etc Having 700 wives and 300 concubines? be like Job and sleeping with daughters?
paisley
1 year ago
Greg
Can't agree more. Their own vulgarity and name calling completely disarms them anyway and earns them nothing. That can only be a good thing.
dorothy
1 year ago
Maybe this will help
Specially to John Greg, who is probably casting his pearls before...oops, I don't want to insult any of God's creatures here...Did you folks know, by the way, that 'God' is a word probably derived from proto-indoeuropean, which has a verb someting like gu-to, which means 'pour out', as in 'anointing' etc (Gods with water buckets from Sumer). The word 'good' is probably a secondary derivate from this. Pre-christian keeper of the temple in the Norse tradition was called a 'Gothi'.
OK, to my reference:
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/1277564-religion-obama/image/18181940
A little acerbic, perhaps, but certainly to the point. For those really interested in mythology and spirituality, I recommend Joseph Campbell's works. No one I think has seen clearer on these issues than he. Science and religion ought to never come into conflict, as they do not address the same areas of life. I said on another thread that I have no problem with any religion that stays in its corner. This is what I meant.
John Greg
1 year ago
dorothy
Actually, I have a great deal of respect for Campbell and his work. His anaylses of the role of myhtology in society are deep, very interesting, and full of wisdom.
However, that being said, we are not really talking about that kind of thing here. What we're talking about her is the desire of extremely naive, credulous, and generally poorly educated (or at least poorly informed) followers of organized religion to essentially take over society and repaint it in their own image with nary a naysaying word, question, or doubt from anyone, anywhere, anyhow.
And that is worlds away from what Campbell discusses.
John Greg
1 year ago
Ooops
anaylses = analyses
myhtology = mythology
Des
1 year ago
A Couple Of
points. The efficacy of homeschooling should be judged on how the student is taught to use the knowledge acquired. If homeschooled students always do better on exams and in life process, then public (and private) schools need to be either "updated" or "eliminated." We should be concentrating on giving students the best education possible, whatever it is, opening their eyes and minds to all the possibilities which lie before them. But education always requires some measure of indoctrination.
We live in a Newtonian universe with a specific set of rules, but it is impinged upon by the Einsteinian universe which is ruled by a entirely different set of "rules." That is a "scientific" fact. Yet some people who accept that information as valid, cannot conceive of a third order of reality and refuse to acknowledge its evidence.
If the Bible was seen only as a "history" of a certain people, it would be valued as a "scientific artifact." Unfortunately, most people who believe (or have faith?) that it only details the exploits of a "Flying Spaghetti Monster" or a "SkyDaddy" have never read or studied it. Their loss.
Luck
1 year ago
Take back canada now
Another great article by Tyee. Much appreciated.
Take back canada now. Nice to see the pendulum is chsnging from evil to good.
Just to let you know, the freaks are in power now. This is what I read article after article from you the people for many tears now.
Candians are slow to good change but right there for bad change eh.
One reader wrote a while back. They are taking away my heritage, no prayers in school, can't put up christmas decorations, can't talk about creation, can't talk about the bible, and on and on it goes.
My hat is off to people who realize we are being shat on by people who have no beliefs in anything else but failure of society.
Hopefully we will see the rise of people who want best for all instead of best only for the elites and the mindless people who support them for no reason but to feel cool.
Go joshua go and defeat the devil people as it should be.
frank2
1 year ago
I don't mind if folks have
I don't mind if folks have curious (to me) beliefs. I do mind strongly if they feel those beliefs give them the right to tell me what I should think. I also object when they seek to reduce access to information which might help illuminate important (to me and most others) "unknowns" or to provide evidence to deal with problems on the basis of facts rather than prior assumptions. Our current Canadian Government certainly fails in the last respect (reduced support for climate-related science, reducing the accuracy of the census).
Bob Watts
1 year ago
A God to die 4
Twice now I've woken up in a Hospital near death. To my not so great surprise, I had no fear, I felt very comfortable and relaxed. Yet for so many years I was brainwashed by the church into thinking that I should pray and beg to be chosen by Christ. Rather I lay there with tubes leading in and out of my body and thanked God for Opium Poppies.
To me religious teaching in its base form is about a rulebook for living like pack animals without killing each other.
Which could make you laugh when you consider religion is the single largest pretext to War.
911 was the starting shot to the beginning of World War III with a duration of the next 666 years. Ah religion, yes to be Christian and float on clouds or to be Muslim (males only!) and have 72 virgins, either way death is the only path to these God given prizes.
Harper wants to share this fun with all of us...
Or am I reading between the lines on this story?
RickW
1 year ago
Jimorsheryl
I doubt that many "thinking people" care much about a purpose. Why (might I ask) do you? Isn't it enough to simply exist? Why would you even contemplate what may or may not happen, once you shuffle off this mortal coil? Is it some kind of quest for immortality? Or is it just ego at work?
Dahlia
1 year ago
Home schooling - in bigotry?
I always have the uneassy feeling with the Evangelical folks that should Jesus reappear, they would be the first to crucify him.
Perhaps they would only slander him - make up some story like that he just might be ((horrors) homosexual!
With the rise of fanatics of various faiths, the last thing we need is to encourage them. After all we had at least 3 centuries of religious wars in Europe. Those were the aptly named Dark Ages.
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
Gosh Mr. Greg
Science is not a moral or ethical system.
Science is a branch of reason.
Reason is a evaluative system of belief.
Belief is something *humans* create.
Hope that helps.
[SNIDE COMMENT DIRECTED AT ANOTHER COMMENTER REMOVED. -MODERATOR.]
zalm
1 year ago
Hmmmm....
So much of this reminds me of reading Robert Heinlein's Future History series of stories and novels. Postulates a country coming to domination by religious believers caricatured in much the same way that the US ultraconservative left is caricatured.
Except it isn't a caricature. Our church has had more than a dozen Americans move here to live and work and take out citizenship in the last fifteen years. All feel similarly - there's a place still for the honest liberal in America, but the spaces are few and far between, and there are no bypass roads to connect some of them.
Where have we seen this before?
And where will we see it again?
I'm reluctant to condemn people for honest belief and an honest desire to make the world a better place no matter where they got their education. Hell, some of the people here got their education and comment factoids and...yes... their beliefs from too many hours in front of the idiot box - talk about the lowest common denominator! But that doesn't invalidate their opinions, only their arguments.
zalm
1 year ago
Glen
"Science is not a moral or ethical system."
Where on earth do you see that John Greg said it was? I don't see it anywhere in his post. Can you point it out?
RickW
1 year ago
salm
It seems that, what goes around comes around:
http://catalog.dclibrary.org/vufind/Record/ocm09282695/Reviews
dorothy
1 year ago
Once again around the block
About Science: In the criminal justice system (quote unquote), there is something known as the rules of evidence. It is about stuff like quality of the source, chain of custody etc. These are logically based rules to determine the weight one can lay on a specific piece of evidence. They are not the evidence itself. There is a sharp division. Science is the same thing. It is a set of rules for what circumstantial information must accompany a piece of information in order to determine its validity. If you say that a fridge keeps a temperature of 4 degrees Celsius, but do not tell that you had your thermometer sitting right inside the fridge door, which is not sealing completely tightly, then you are not following the rules of science. The assumption would be, that given no other information, the thermometer would have been in the midst of the bulk of the fridge and its contents, the same way you are told to stick the meat thermometer into the thickest part of your roast, or else your reading might give you 'rare' instead of 'well done'. The actual readings are not 'science', but 'information'. How you get them evaluate them, and report them is science.
Hope this helps.
Irish8th
1 year ago
Alvin54
I neglected to mention that my kids were fish out of water in public school - floundering soles.
wassamattaU
1 year ago
jimorsheryl (glen or glenda?)
I have submitted your post to fstdt.com.
You're welcome.
samuidave (not verified)
1 year ago
Jimorsheryl re: purpose of life
I find comfort in the words of Epicurus:
"Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not; if death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?" Epicurus (341–270 B.C)
Booker
1 year ago
fstdt
Funny! I haven't seen that site before.
zalm
1 year ago
Thanks RickW
Sounds like a fabulous book!
John Greg
1 year ago
zalm said:
"Glen
'Science is not a moral or ethical system.'
Where on earth do you see that John Greg said it was? I don't see it anywhere in his post. Can you point it out?"
Precisely.
John Greg
1 year ago
dorothy said:
Exactly. It's a method; a process.
And that is why I get so unendingly frustrated wth these theist/spiritual yahoos who keep trying to describe science as another form of faith-based belief system when it is nothing of the kind whatsoever. Making such idiotic, uninformed comparisons only shows their profound ignorance of what science actually is and simply adds to the futility of arguing with them
...
yet arguing with them, while such a complete waste of time, is nonetheless both entertaining and extremely important. We, the educated, thinking, thoughtful, questioning, intellectual people of the planet, simply cannot allow such vain, deep, profound stupidity to gain so much ground and exert so much social control.
Willful ignorance, stifling of curiousity, curtailing intelligence, limiting discourse, censoring thought, adhering to mindless doctrine, enforcing authoritarian idiot ideology does not, can not, and will not lead to paradise. For anyone. Anywhere.
lynn
1 year ago
Once we begin to tell sea stories.....
Nothing like keeping systems of belief oh-so-safely secluded in the quarters of religious fundamentalism alone.....
Over there....dear fellas. Look in that direction.
Do not dare look over here
We, the sublimely innocent, and always rational, remain
Untainted by belief.
So the story goes....
Even though the history of the world and the relentless infamy of "reasonable men" tells a whole other story.
Man reasons because of his beliefs.....because of what he values, what matters.
Otherwise, why would Man bother to reason at all?
And IF one could reason without employing a man-made system of belief, where would that take place? In a vacuum?
Life as one long mathematical equation.
Gee, sure sounds like fun.
Sorry, but when e=mc2 was released from the scientific genie bottle, it became subject to the reasoning of man which as Glen Murtz points out is an evaluative system of belief .....belief that is created by guess who? Hu--- Be---gs.
Once released into our grasp, e=mc2 lies at our mercy ....to be fondled, prayed to, bowed to, manipulated, spit at, toyed with......
Forever changed.
What we choose to believe can be our saving grace.
It can also be what damns us.
But as human beings we cannot get out of the way of ourselves.
For good or for bad.
Despite, the neutral ground of science,
we remain always in the room,
partisan, beliefs in pocket.
And it changes the temperature.
In Pynchon's "Lowlands" through his character Dennis Flange, sea stories become a metaphor and function of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:
“It is all right to listen but not to tell stories about that sea, because you and the truth of a true lie were thrown sometime way back into a curious contiguity and as long as you are passive you can remain aware of the truth’s extent but the minute you become active you are somehow, if not violating the convention outright, at least screwing up the perspective of things”
To acknowledge that, to recognize our own complicity in an inescapable and all too human belief system is to become aware that our glory, as human beings, lies in our humility.
freebear
1 year ago
"public schools are designed to destroy faith"
Oh, I thought it was pedophiles in the church that did that!
John Greg
1 year ago
So lynn ...
is it belief that makes 2 + 2 = 4?
Or is it something perhaps more solidly grounded, and less ambiguous, than belief or a belief system?
Yes, much of what makes up a person is in some fashion or other based upon some parts or other of what may be called belief, or a belief system. But not all; not the totality.
And science, unlike religion, makes a valid attempt at avoiding and bypassing the traps and pitfalls of beliefs and belief systems. Of course it is not perfect; little is. But, the direct polar opposite of religion, science does not base its precepts, theories, and principles upon "Thus is so because I say so; death and eternal damnation to all who disagree".
lynn
1 year ago
Mr. Greg.....
You keep failing to realize that the issue is not with science.
It is with reason.
Unless you plan to keep 2+2=4 and e=mc2 forever safely sealed within the scientific genie bottle, never to be touched by the human mind or hand....then THE issue is always with reason, not science.
As for this....what could be more fundamentally Fundamental then this:
" We, the educated, thinking, thoughtful, questioning, intellectual people of the planet, simply cannot allow such vain, deep, profound stupidity to gain so much ground and exert so much social control."
Sorry, Mr. Greg, but that is equally as scary as the fire and brimstone arrogant vanities of any religious Fundamentalist....
Booker
1 year ago
Belief
Everyone has beliefs and has the right to defend them. But the whole point of the scientific method is to filter out belief in order to discover the workings of nature as they really are, not as we believe them to be, or want them to be. Since the scientific endeavor is performed by human beings, it is extremely difficult to filter out all bias, but it must be attempted. In the end our beliefs are irrelevent to nature. Electromagnetism doesn't care what we believe. Gamma ray bursts don't care what we believe. Convection currents don't care what we believe. When a tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound, not caring what we believe. The process of biological evolution continues, whether we believe it does or not.
Saying that science is just another belief system is a tired old defense mechanism to preserve ones own pet beliefs. It's an argument that arose with postmodern sophistry in the sixties (abetted by religious literalists and various theologians) and it continues to this day.
John Greg
1 year ago
Quote:When a tree falls in
But what about Schrödinger's cat? Hmm? What does it believe?
/just pullin' yer leggings
Booker
1 year ago
Lynn
Can you explain what that means? What does "touching 2+2=4 with the human mind or hand" mean? If you can explain that to me maybe I can understand the point you are trying to make. What do you mean by saying it is safely sealed within the scientific genie bottle?
John Greg
1 year ago
Ah, I see
lynn said:
Yes, you are quite right. I have failed to see that that was your point. I'm sorry. If you had stated that, then I somehow missed it.
Yes, I agree. One of the major problems is indeed with reason.
lynn also said:
Yes, I can certainly see how it might appear so. But in the end I think it is the means to the chosen end that would define it as such -- or not.
Contrary to our fire and brimstone not-quite-brethren, I would not condone nor promote violence, killing, ostracism, and so forth -- the favoured tools of all evangelical theists when promoting their love of mankind and the plan for peace. I would, however, strongly, fanatically, condone and promote open-eyed education, with no limits on subject matter.
If you see what I mean.
Des
1 year ago
John Greg
explains himself to Lynn, rejecting "faith" and promoting "knowledge" in its place. Hmm. Sounds familiar. Think I read about that somewhere. Wasn't it in Genesis? Something about learning the difference between "good" and "evil." Not that we have put the knowledge to our advantage up to now. But maybe -- just maybe -- faith is what we require in order to continue putting one foot in front of the other, while we hope that we're on the right path, helping (rather than hindering) all the others who travel the same road.
lynn
1 year ago
How's this?
I'll put it this way.
Think of separate beds.
Science is the sociopath in the bed next to you.
He/she has no morals or ethics.
As long as each of you remain hermetically "sealed" in your own separate beds, no touching, no interaction, no contact.
No problem.
But when you decide to share the same bed.....or the same planet....
lynn
1 year ago
Well said, Des:
"But maybe -- just maybe -- faith is what we require in order to continue putting one foot in front of the other, while we hope that we're on the right path, helping (rather than hindering) all the others who travel the same road."
dorothy
1 year ago
Lynn you have me confused
about what you are for or against. You said above that 'the problem' was not with science but with reason. Now blister me if you don't start in on the science again, calling it sociopathic! Who or what is the enemy, please make up your mind.
Science of course, being a tool, has right enough no morals or conscience, just like a hammer or a jigsaw doesn't. That doesn't mean it can't be employed by people with these attributes and sometimes is.
Now reason - I don't know what's wrong with a dose of that? Give me a roomful of reasonable people to work with any day, and I will not, I assure you, wish them exchanged for true believers of any denomination! Reason is what prevents us from being alternately lynch mobs and happy-go-lucky idiots, or something else equally unbalanced. Please tell me what is your problem with this commodity?
Des
1 year ago
To All Those
who blame some, or many, or the majority, or all of the wars we've suffered through on "religion." Please look again at history. True enough, religion has been quoted as a justification for making war on our neighbours, but it is really just the excuse given for seizing his property, his wealth, his land, and getting revenge on him for real or perceived slights and insults. None of which is true religion.
As Christ said (in the Bible), true religion is this, looking after widows and little children. Which is why Mother Theresa is a saint, but the inventor of the Spanish Inquisition (a political, not a religious organization in origin) is not.
Of course, we know that Hitler did not like the Jews, but it was not because he abhored their religious practices. No, it was their financial acumen that set him off, and their non-Aryan status could be easily transferred psychologically to their religious identity.
John Greg
1 year ago
lynn and Des
Des said:
Yes, indeed.
Followed by killing, raping, ostrasizing, and condemning to eternal damnation anyone and everyone who is not on the same pathetic, narrow, dusty, uninformed, and myopically anti-human ideological road.
Psychopathology and the study of neuropathology, including briefs on minor forms of frontal lobe strokes, speak well to such ugly hubris.
As for the rest of the last couple of comments posted by you two sociopaths ... Wow. That's about all I can say. Wow.
You two, at least in your rhetoric, are the perfect defintion of the psychopathology, the inerrant belief in righteousness, and the morally depleted spin on unethical behaviour that is the justification of the crimes against humanity that is the game, the trust, and the true goal of faith-based fanatics.
Very, very scary.
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
Your Reasonable Faith
I'll do this slowly.
Pay attention.
You can use science all you like to prove the sun will rise tomorrow, but the final result will *always* require belief until it actually happens. Hume, actually.
If you don't know that science is subject to 'reason' - which itself can be a flawed *belief* system, you [OFFENSIVE COMMENT REMOVED. -MODERATOR.] happily goes about being a productive member of the destructive, reasonable system killing our world.
Let's see if another tack helps ...
Here's a 'reasonable' man from today's Tyee's headline:
"Being able to receive crucial oil to fuel your economy from a stable, friendly country like Canada has an awful lot of merit to it," BMO senior economist Earl Sweet told The Tyee. "I suspect that will overcome," he claims, "current environmental misconceptions that are being propagated in some quarters of the United States."
See the faith?
When you do, you'll understand that you “reason” loving types are losing to "faith" every day!
And these same faith-based use their beloved "reason" to sodomize any (how odd, this is - isn't it?) contrary "reason" outside the confines of that belief!
Look.
A "reasonable" gentleman places "economy" as the highest value in society. His position is envied and prestigious; he has the ears of politicians and NGO's of many stripes and persuasions, and it may be inferred (if incorrectly, as per our "sun" experiment) that he has enjoyed this position due to repeated demonstrations of reliability within the system he occupies - a crucial property.
There can be no doubt he is performing his duty as any "reasonable" person should.
Surely *you* can see that his "reasoning" has allowed you incredible privilege - even as your grubby little, compromised hands claw for every dollar you *must* have to simply exist in this "reasonable" world ...
He has no proof that economic rational *should* be the primary value our society seeks, but he can (and will) produce volumes of *solid science* in the form of rigorous mathematical models that will show why the value of despoiling the environment outweighs any other considerations. And it will be the work of men of science.
This reasonable, economic man is one of you!
If you refuse to see that *YOUR* "faith in reason" (and your obsequiousness to it) already runs (and destroys) the world, that it routinely uses science; that the 'old school' Gods you so desperately want to throw out are merely proxies for the horror-mongering one staring you in the face....
You are evil. Surely you must know it.
Continue please to expel your hate of faith. Tell us more about your rational, cool-headed murders. Tell your children of its pleasures. Defend your banker, you reasonable people.
Your reasonable values do not recognize the immeasurable, beautiful thing that is simply - "to be".
Spirit. Oneness. Existence. Being.
Learn of it or die at the hands of your new God.
samuidave (not verified)
1 year ago
when 'belief' is no longer belief
If one defines 'belief' as a perceived explanation used to understand the cosmos in which we live, 'reason' becomes a 'belief' (ie, 'reasoned belief').
But by doing so, the shortcomings of our lexicon allow one to exploit the everyday meaning of the word 'belief' (ie, faith-based belief). Through wordplay, by conflating these different meanings of belief, 'faith-based belief' is deceptively tendered as a rival to 'reasoned belief' since both offer an explanation and both, albeit misleadingly, are defined as 'belief'.
The critical difference, however, is 'faith-based belief' does not seek to uncover a comprehensive understanding, whereas 'reasoned belief' hunts for it. 'Faith-based belief' has all the answers it needs; 'reasoned belief' remains unsatisfied as it keeps digging up more mysteries. 'Faith-based belief' has captured 'truth'; 'reasoned belief' wants to solve its puzzle.
Once we permit any proffered explanation as sufficient to constitute 'truth', then this wordplay is moot. Any symbol put into the puzzle of life will do, as 'belief' is all we need.
As long as 'reason' is misunderstood as 'belief' simply because it offers perception via an electrical discharge within what we believe to be our brain, this stylized banter can go on forever.
Until a better explanation is offered up, I'll go on believing "2+2=4" and revel in believing "life as one long mathematical equation". For I have reason to believe maths is the universal language of the cosmos as we currently understand it. On what 'belief' should we abandon this language in favour of another?
Such ponderings as "why would Man bother to reason at all?" are interesting to consider (a mental masturbation, of sorts, akin to theology as the study of nothing), but as Rene Descartes stated, "Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum" [I doubt therefore I think, I think therefore I am] (1596-1650).
Ultimately, lynn et al, I still fail to appreciate even the vulgarities of your arguments in offering any insight. To bastardize the word 'reason' by claiming it is nothing more than yet another suspect 'belief' is truly a cognitive short.
I trust you may want to clarify my mispparehensions.
John Greg
1 year ago
Murtz
Murtz said:
That is sophistry, and philosophical/rhetorical trickery that has no place within this kind of dialogue, because if you play that kind of goofball philosophical trick/game, anything and everything can be argued into anything and everything the rhetorician wants it to be, no holds barred, which leads to "It's turtles all the way down." Which is just horseshit.
So, yes, I am accusing you of intellectual dishonesty, rhetorical deceit, and plain mendacity -- or perhaps you are just arguing from emotion rather than knowledge, intellect, and study.
The primary problem here is that your arguments, some valid, some not so much, have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what I have been posting about.
As well, your rhetoric/posting/text is very confusing, very poorly written, badly punctuated, sloppy, and intellectually poorly structured -- in that it does not follow its own argument, nor make coherent sense.
Nonetheless, your rhetoric has a great many points that are "true" so far as truth exists. But what you are ranting about -- and for the record much of what you are ranting about I agree with -- has absolutely nothing to do with I have been saying, so far as I can see.
[SNIDE COMMENT REMOVED. -MODERATOR.]
Cheerio.
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
Samuidave...
Science has value in what it can provide, which is a way of describing and explaining, but it is not a humane value system. I trust we can all appreciate that science does *not* tell us whether to keep mongoloid children alive. As I'm sure you'd agree, we need to look to some other means to provide a rationale.
So we can look to reason. Or maybe religion.
What basis could we have for keeping this being alive?
Well - that depends.
We can run through a list of things we'd like, like honesty, trustworthiness, etc., and we can say that we value these things because they allow people to live together and provide each individual with a tacitly agreed upon way of living.
And we can say that these things we like are both admirable traits of an individual and actions we should admire. We'll call them virtues - things we value. None of these are 2+2 - there's nothing 'scientific' to them - except perhaps for the completely immeasurable (oh I'm sure there's a release of molecules - but let’s leave that for now) feelings they inspire in us.
So what will we call this collection of values?
Judaism? Gods Law? Reason? Hinduism? HDTV?
Under any name, they provide the basis for a society or a community. An agreed upon approach to life. A value system.
You can disagree, but I believe that all these 'systems' come from *US*.
We make them up. (Yes - I've tipped my hand.)
My problem with any of these value systems is when they become absolutes.
And reason, like many religions, has become so absolute it no longer can claim to be what it is.
Reason has become intolerant, unjust and inhuman. It is quite literally, death-loving. Reason has taken up the non-humane system of science to provide it with justification for slaughter. Reason claims economics as a product of its devising and uses that as motive to obliterate all other value systems.
Surely you can see the problem.
We have an example of this slide into absolutism in Mr. Gregs posts. Watch as his initial bafflement on the issue raised becomes a hardened and belligerent perspective, completely oblivious to the environment he once coveted. He engages those who at first glance seem to be of like mind, revels in their acknowledgment, surges ahead, full of confidence and blustery words from "science". Assured of his merits, he rests congratulatory, until (damnit!) yet another questioning voice is raised.
Finally, we see his descent into demonizing and labeling as "sociopaths" those who so much as offer an alternative world view. Soon, they'll be subhuman. Barbarians. Insurgents. Terrorists.
I assume that when he's finished with the unbelievers and needing further impurities to cleanse, he'll be obliged to immolate himself on his beloved altar.
You don't want to be inside his beloved church when that happens - but we all are.
A very nice, if wholly unintended example on his part, of what happens when "reason" finds no room for doubt.
Thanks Mr. Greg.
Booker
1 year ago
The Delusions of Mr. Murtz
Quote:
Are you for real? Commenters defend the scientific method and you accuse them of being evil, of supporting murder? That's a really attractive philosophy you have there, Mr. Murtz. Do you realize that some of the most passionate and vocal defenders of the natural world are scientists, and some of the most destructive and passionate rapers of the natural world are "people of faith"? This demonizing of those who seek to understand nature is ignorant and thoroughly unenlightend.
Quote:
Perhaps your problem is your concept of Reason. You talk of it as if it is a force, like Evil, or God. It is much more ethereal. It is not a thing. And people have used many different excuses for killing other humans, for deciding, like you, that other people are evil. Like your reason given above:
Quote:
A completely farcical and delusional analysis of the views of other commenters on this thread has lead you to describe them as evil.
Quote:
You fail to understand that doubt is the very basis of the scientific practice. Absolutism and scientific practice are completely incompatible. If a scientist is absolutist about his or her theories or findings, then that person has failed at the endeavor. That person is no longer, by definition, doing science.
Booker
1 year ago
Lynn
quote
It is exceedingly strange to call the quest to understand the wonders of nature "sociopathic". Carl Sagan, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking...just a bunch of murderers and deviants, I guess.
lynn
1 year ago
To Dorothy, Booker , John Greg .....
Booker:
Science has no morals. No ethics.
Science does not care.
That is a sociopathic characteristic.
And guess what? It is also a characteristic of good science. Man, from science's beginning days, agreed that is it is extremely important that that is what it must be.
It must be completely without bias.
But as soon as it it comes into contact, out of the isolation of theory and formula.....
Then, it is precisely because science does not care,
That man must. And does care.
Then as G. Murtz has said better than I ever will, our caring results in us through reason attaching and choosing one value over another - from a long established human belief system.
(And, Dorothy, because Booker only asked me about the meaning of "forever safely sealed within the scientific genie bottle) that is all I responded to.)
To continue on:
And in that above belief-based intervention by Man, reason becomes the issue - because reason comes with bias. And science, remember does not, so science is never the issue.
This is not an advocation of belief-based science as Booker and others have suggested here - it is a recognition of what is actually happening - the quandary Man is faced with. What choice do we have have?
But to intervene.
And yet when we intervene, and depending on who has the power to intervene and decide value, along with the application of reason based on the good/evil, bad/good, ethical/non-ethical beliefs of man, science is forever changed and becomes biased, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a very dangerous way.... sometimes because of that bias certain rights are chosen over other rights etc. etc etc.
Again, precisely because (if it is to be truly scientific) science cannot care.
Man must care..and does.
And because of the way humans reason, and their intentions in doing so, and the beliefs and biases involved, Reason then becomes the issue. For good or for bad. The inherently inescapable catch-22 of our human situation....and of our relationship with science.
As I stated before...
Sometimes it is our saving grace. Sometimes it damns us.
What choice do we have?
John Greg
1 year ago
It seems to me ...
[OFFENSIVE COMMENT DIRECTED AT ANOTHER COMMENTER REMOVED. -MODERATOR.]
I mean, I am really having trouble finding any sense in your words. You both seem to be bequeathing reason and science with some kind of functional personality, some living, breathing, operative soul, as it were.
lynn said:
That is just so much nonsense. Science, like the chair you are sitting on, the window you look out of, the earth under your feet, has no capacity to care, to experience morality, to enact ethics. For crying out loud science is not a person, it is a method.
Like Glenn, you engage in meaningless sophistry. I mean for crying out loud, you sound rather like someone la-la-la-ing their way through an LSD trip, and Murtz sounds like some angry pope or something. I mean, I'm evil because I am trying to define the essential differences between faith/religion and rationality/science?
Wow. Just wow. Talk about proving my point for me.
/shakes head and backs carefully away from the mad dogs
Booker
1 year ago
communication problem
If I may illustrate my problem with that statement by using word substitution.
"Knitting has no morals. No ethics. Knitting does not care. That is a sociopathic characteristic." Is that a reasonable statement to you?
People have morals. People can be sociopaths. Science is not a person. If you want to say that a scientist (or auto rapair person, or accountant) has no morals, or is good, or bad, then do so. Get specific. Do you really mean that what David Suzuki was sociopathic when he worked in the lab? That Carl Sagan was sociopathic when he looked at the stars? Are you saying that knowledge is evil? I'm at a loss.
It is important to define terms precisely in order to have a discussion that can go anywhere. So I challenge you to provide a precise definition of "Reason", and of "Science". Maybe then your argument will be more comprehensible and less vague, less stoner-like.
Here are definitions pulled from the interwebs:
REASON: The intellectual ability to apprehend the truth cognitively, either immediately in intuition, or by means of a process of inference.
SCIENCE: is a systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about nature and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories
and for good measure,
FAITH: Faith is in general the persuasion of the mind that a certain statement is true. It is the belief and the assent of the mind to the truth of what is declared by another, based on his or her authority and truthfulness.
lynn
1 year ago
Well, off with our heads, Mr. Greg....
Being the oh-so-reasonable man that you are.
I mean, how dare we disagree with the divine right of Mr.Greg.
Who has so "reasonably" hurled one nasty, supercilious insult after the other at those of us who dared to do so.
So.....hi ho .....hi ho.... off to the guillotine we must go.
Oh, one more thing, Mr. Greg.....
In quoting me here,
You just "happened" to leave out this:
"And guess what? It is also a characteristic of good science. Man, from science's beginning days, agreed that is it is extremely important that that is what it must be.
It must be completely without bias."
Oh, and before you bring the blade down Mr. Greg -
You did say one thing that actually made sense:
"For crying out loud science is not a person, it is a method."
Exactly.
Just as science is not nature.
It is a system of methodology. It is not the thing itself.
Which if you had been paying attention...which you clearly have not.
Was central to this argument.
The difference between things (in this case, methods) and ....the actual complexities inherent in the living of life itself.
lynn
1 year ago
Booker
"Science is not a person."
Exactly.
So your assumptions that I was calling scientists sociopaths is completely false.
I was speaking metaphorically (remember the separate bed example?.....and yes, I know science does not sleep in a bed) in terms of characteristics of the scientific methodogy which I have already explained:
That the scientific "method", a thing, is a method whose characteristics are that it have: no bias, no feeling, no conscience, no morals, no ethics.
The minute it has those things, it is no longer good science.
And yet, somehow, it ends up with those.
Now how does that happen?
And why does that happen?
Well, I think we have covered that ground.
Over and over.
And I don't plan to do it one more time....
But, you may want to take up that "sociopathic" thing with Mr. Greg who has no problem calling commentors/human beings, on this thread "sociopaths' when thy hold different views than him.
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
Stepped in it.
Yes Lynn - let's finish up....
Booker - look.
We get reason "immediately in intuition" or by "means of a process of inference."
Sure you like that definition?
Okay - then what is "intuition"?
It's really a "hunch", isn't it?
And "inference"?
Seriously, you want to go there?
You can "prove" the sun will come up tomorrow, the only validity your evidence has - is in your BELIEF that it is true. Past evidence is not absolute evidence. Even the scientific community recognizes that. That's why science runs on theories. Don't you know that? Whoa...
I stand by what I've stated all along - Science is not a humane value system. It doesn't inform humans on right living, moral conduct or how to organize society. It never should be that system and was never meant to be. But that does mean science needs a value system as a guide if is not to become the tool of evil(which I define as anti-existence).
Like say, The Hippocratic Oath.
Heard of it?
But those math guys never got the memo did they?
Maybe BP just bought out their findings for a few years, like they've been doing with marine biologists and others on the Gulf coast.
Anyways, if science is so superfantasmagoric golly gee whiz in your mind, why do you suppose it needs that Oath?
Think.
The issue that lynn, myself and at least some other rational individuals have here is *that science serving reason (and most especially a reason grotesquely tilted towards an economics of growth) is murderous*.
You can stand back and defend "science" in general. Nobody cares. We're on board. Not the issue. We've moved on. Keep up.
It's the use of science to serve the EVIL (yes - I stand by that statement) of Reason in its present incarnation.
You thought that you were going to draw a line between "faith" and "reason", but turns out, oops, there is none.
Wakey wakey.
We make it all up.
Your assertion that faith and reason are separate things shows the poverty of your insight.
You are grabbing at water with a fist!
Value systems and their "friends". That's what this is about.
Humanity must realize that a value system that may be flawed, augmented by a tool that is not value based, must use a very different weighting of principles - or we're doomed.
PS: I'm still waiting for you folks to tell us why your "reasonable" people are so worthy. Why your banker is going to save the world through "ethical investing". How your mortgage broker becomes a crucial component of "sustainability". How your pension plan is an "agent of change". How "micro-loans" will lower the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Try and keep a straight face like your economic people do.
All these processes and people use a variety of sciences to explain the supremacy of their reason.
And they're all gonna get us killed.
You and Greg have a good time with your threesome of reason, k?
John Greg
1 year ago
Glenn said:
I don't know where that came from. I never have, and never would, defend any of those people or their policies. And I am not sure I would say their ideologies, policies, et al are born of either science or reason.
You seem to me to be confusing the issue by associating non-scientific issues of corporate, and/or public/private policy just to suit your argument. It seems to me to be a series of false dichotomies falling over top of each other.
I'll admit it freely, you've baffled me. Maybe Booker can make some sense of it all, I don't know. But I do know you've lost me; I fail to see how your argument addresses mine, or Booker's for that matter. Same goes for lynn's vague and dissociative palaver. I don't get it at all. It is as though we are all using the same words, but assigning vastly differing definitions to them.
Booker
1 year ago
god
NO! The method is designed to protect the results from the bias of the scientist (a person) and the subject. You are anthropomorphising a method -- it can't have bias, feelings, or morals any more than the instruction manual to your television can. Or, think of it as a shopping list of things to do. Does your shopping list have morals? YOU have morals.
@Murtz:
It's not a humane value system or an inhumane value system. It is not a value system. Faith is not a value system either.
The Hippocratic Oath is for medicine, not science.
I said way back that all knowledge is provisional. Science cannot provide "proof" that the sun will come up tomorrow, only evidence (only mathematics provides proofs). We then weigh the evidence and probably conclude that the sun will come up again tomorrow, but we can't say 100% for certain. You do not possess a strong grasp of this subject.
And what is it with your bankers and pension plans and mortgage brokers, anyway? From the evidence of the past decade they are the least rational, most faith-based sector of our society (and that goes for most economists too)! What do they have to do with the scientific method? You aren't conflating BP and Bankers with "science" are you? Are you? Surely you're not that banal. Please tell me I'm not back in the college dorm with the bong being passed around. Hey man, there is no reality man.
samuidave (not verified)
1 year ago
Murderous Science
Science is just the methodology we use when we are trying to figure stuff out. The ethical or moral component involved in science resides within the scientist only. It is mentally disturbing to me to have one define a method or a tool in psychological terms since there is no inherent conscience involved.
lynn: "That the scientific "method", a thing, is a method whose characteristics are that it have: no bias, no feeling, no conscience, no morals, no ethics.
The minute it has those things, it is no longer good science.
And yet, somehow, it ends up with those."
NO MORE than a car ends up with a value system because it is operated by a human. It akin to the age-old argument that guns don't kill, people do. Our own humanity is the weak link in our societal circumstances.
Glen Murtz: "The issue that lynn, myself and at least some other rational individuals have here is *that science serving reason (and most especially a reason grotesquely tilted towards an economics of growth) is murderous*.
THAT IS a mighty broad brush to paint 'science serving reason' with; the values of the reasoner will always run some interference. But until all values are deemed 'bad', and 'bad' acts ultimately lead to 'murder', all acts of science cannot rightfully be labelled murderous.
Conflation is not assimulation.
Des
1 year ago
Gee Whiz -
I considered all the comments last night, and read the new ones tonight when I opened my laptop again. But it seems that everyone has cemented personal opinions firmly into place, leaving no room for consideration of any other pov. So, since it's pointless (i.e., "unreasonable")to even attempt to examine the differences among such things as science, knowledge, faith, belief, reality, dimension, evidence, medicine (not a science?), or conflation, I'm off to read some more of Marci Macdonald's essays.
lynn
1 year ago
What is a metaphor for?
“The fog comes / on little cat feet.”
No! Fog doesn't have cat's feet.
Don't be silly.
That is oh-so-mentally disturbing to me, Mr. Sandburg, when you talk that way.
Booker wrote:
"NO! The method is designed to protect the results from the bias of the scientist (a person) and the subject. "
Exactly, but I wasn't speaking as to why the method was designed. I was using a metaphorical example to illustrate "the characteristics" of the design.
Yes, Des, according to Booker, medicine is not a science.
John Greg
1 year ago
lynn said:
No, that is most emphatically not what Booker said.
Either you have misunderstood him, or you are playing propoganda games, or perhaps just lying.
As for the rest of your post, it is yet more incomprehensible nonsense.
John Greg
1 year ago
Query: lynn and Murtz
Either one, are you theists?
What is your ... hmm ... belief system?
Simple question, and no answer required, of course.
But it would help focus the discussion if you did answer.
And it's easy too.
However, if you want to take "the fifth" as they say down yonder, well, gosh, that's fine.
I'm just curious.
All you need do is say Yes, or No.
samuidave (not verified)
1 year ago
I keep harkening back, ....
... in my mind, to David Berlinski’s book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions through this thread.
For those completely unfamiliar with this read, it is essentially based on the premise that both natural and supernatural explanations to scientific theories are given an equally meritorious footing. [my interpretation]
This seems to me to be where lynn, Glenn Murtz et al are coming from -- correct? If not, loosely, what school of philosophical or metaphysical theory are you working from?
This is certainly a most curious thread.
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
for Samuidave... the curious bastard.
I have not read Berlinski's book, but my brief perusal of it's Amazon reviews lends me to believe he understands and elucidates the problem... I thank you for the reference. You can safely assume I will read it at my first opportunity.
I propose that Science serves Reason.
I propose that Reason (like Faith) is a human created system of values and hence, open to varying evaluations of those values.
I propose that Reason has overwhelmingly been interpreted as Self Interest.
I propose that Self Interest, under guise of Reason, overwhelmingly provides personal monetary gain or worth as the predominant value in our society and, more insidiously, as a modus operandi for scientific investigation.
As an example: If science is not looking out for its own interests (monetary input to further its ends), it cannot be reasonable. See my BP purchasing scientists post as an example.
I propose that this is a flawed and evil system.
The conclusions of these proposals I leave to you to discern; you seem genuinely interested enough and intellectually prepared to do so. I am quite seriously open to hearing refutations of these proposals, but will caution you that skepticism is my natural disposition and I will find any reasonable grounds to challenge any absolute!
Again - and in all seriousness - thank you for the referral.
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
PS:
I "get" the paradox of absolutism and my abhorrence of it.
So let us find pluralism as a safe place to hide.
Flux is both our condition and our remedy.
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
hmmm
... it appears I may have to hold my nose while reading Berlinski's book, but it needs investigation nonetheless.
5keptical
1 year ago
Murky Murtz
It is deliciously ironic that Murtz relies on evil reason in his attempts to convince us about evil reason
5keptical
1 year ago
Murtz proposals
Murtz has given us a set of proposals and asked folk to argue against them.
Instead Murtz should argue for them without the method he proposes has been so subverted and thus evil.
What would Murtz put in its place? Do we do bridge engineering by feel? Biblical aeronautics perhaps? Come on Murtz! Let's grant you that you're right. What do replace reason and the scientic method with?
jimorsheryl
1 year ago
Here we go again
John Greg:
What qualifies you as someone whose opinion can be taken as fact??
jimorsheryl
1 year ago
Religion Has Been The Base For Wars etc.
One of the rants often thrown out as fact by the anti-religious crowd is all those bad wars fought in the name of religion.
How many religious wars can hold a candle to Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun,the Roman Empire,Hitler, Mao or Stalin to name just a few.
Most people have no idea what the true message of Christianity is, and for that matter have decided that GOD is not worth knowing and therefore will spend their entire lifetime pursuing what they can only see with their natural eyes.
If you want to see the end of that road, visit a nursing home one day, and look into all the vacant eyes!
In the words of Johnny Cash, 'what is man without a spirit, and what is a spirit without the knowledge of the Creator who made him".
Frank
1 year ago
If I may...
I think the direction Glen and lynn are coming from is the idea that we've replaced one "god" with another but we are no more ahead.
If I believe I shouldn't kill because its one of the 10 commandments and I follow that am I any worse of a person if I instead was an atheist and didn't kill because I saw it as an unreasonable way to attain my goals?
If what I believe is taken on faith from a bible or priests or whatever is that any different than what I believe based on a secular education?
If I am nothing more than a (somewhat) hairless ape and I get my values from religion is that any different than the values I would have if I attended secular schools and university? Because regardless of how I got there I end up believing in the same things.
Because what is education except learning the works of others?
Am I the smartest person who ever lived and am able to arrive at the answers to the questions of the universe on my own or at some level am I relying on what others told me, be they professors or priests?
Because in the end, is not reason itself something you learn?
Or to put it another way, can someone with an IQ between 80 and 150 be expected to be able to create his own value system without reference to others?
John Greg
1 year ago
jimorsheryl ...
jimorsheryl asks "What qualifies you as someone whose opinion can be taken as fact?" And my answer would be that nothing qualifies my opinions to be taken as fact, except, or course, where I have stated facts, in which case I may be bolstering my opinion with supportive fact.
My opinions are nothing more than that: Opinions. However, it is my contention that most, though certainly not all, of my opinions are what we might call "informed" opinions. Meaning, opinions based on research, education, extensive, though never extensive enough, reading, and so forth.
Regretable as it is, yes, some of my opinions are based on little more than my beliefs -- as is certainly the methodology of theist and faith-based individuals. But I make an honest, if somewhat failed, attempt at trying to avoid stating those weaker opinions in any but the friendliest of company.
On the other hand, any facts I may have stated are simply that: Facts.
Facts is facts; opinions is opinions.
John Greg
1 year ago
jimorsheryl stated:
Well, yes, but it would seem that most Christians have no idea what the true message of Christianity is either. And certainly, only a vanishingly small number of them can ever agree on it at any given moment.
lynn
1 year ago
"All you need do is say Yes, or No."
Through those words you reveal yourself, Mr. Greg.
Ohhh....Mr. Greg. You would soooo love to think that I am a theist.
It would fill in all those "baffling" blanks for you.
I'll answer both you and samiudave's question in the same way:
The School of Neither Yes or No.
Sorry, to continually disappoint you....
5keptical: Glen Murtz, at least from my read of him, is not calling Reason evil, he is calling the co-option of Reason by self-interest as evil. And that when that self-interested co-option enters the scientific realm, there are catastrophic consequences.
Open your eyes, those consequences are all around us...and the co-option of Reason is accelerating at an ever-increasing rate.
John Greg
1 year ago
Frank asks:
That's a rather broad question, but the answer to it is Yes. Because, in a secular education you are given the opportuniuty to question, experiment, test, and verify or falsify any and all claims given to you by the educational authority. And that is most absolutely not the case with religious education or indoctrination for the simple fact that any serious testing of religious claims falsifies the lot -- well, not the lot, but certailny all the fantastical ones.
The point being, in the secular world one is, at least in theory, given the means to be and encouraged to be skeptical and to test extreme claims for veracity.
Quite the opposite is the case in the theist world, where one is rather strongly encouraged to be credulous, undoubting, and fully believing of any claims, however extreme and fanciful, made by the authority figurehead.
John Greg
1 year ago
lynn said:
Yes, too true; you are quite right. It was a foolish question asked whle I was in my cups. I should never have given in to my lesser motivations.
Tsk, tsk on me for such foolishness.
lynn
1 year ago
Good to see you posting again, Frank
Frank wrote:
"Because in the end, is not reason itself something you learn?"
And when the kind of reason the world is being taught to accept is warped by greater and greater degrees of evil self-interest......
Then you are teaching Madness.
willy
1 year ago
John Gregg quotes "Faith
John Gregg quotes
"Faith says, unequivocabley, "Such and such is fact simply because I (and my invisible pink flying dragon Bert) say it is; if you disagree with me you are a blasphemer, a traitor, a heretic, and should be silenced with as much vigour and prejudice as I can muster."
I find it interesting reading these diccussions and relating them to the belief of man caused globull warming will destroy the world. Now that takes faith not science.
Frank
1 year ago
John Greg
I understand what you say, it SHOULD be different. But is it?
I know for a fact it isn't for everybody. Michael Campbell has been exposed to the same facts I have and has come to believe his views are based on reason, yet I find what he believes to be totally unreasonable.
Now, I'm a left-wing atheist. I base my views on what I see, my own ability to reason, limited as it is, and the knowledge I've gained from school, university, books and so on. Yet I'm sure many here find my views to be just as unreasonable as I find Campbell's. Probably because my values have a different base than theirs. I hold different things than them dearer and that affects what I consider to be reasonable.
In the end, the big question is how do so many of us get the same education and yet hold such wildly divergent value systems?
In a faith-based system you don't see the divergent opinions as much although you do see it to some extent otherwise there wouldn't be 300 or whatever different branches of Christianity.
Yet, I can remember economic classes at university where the students lapped up everything the professor said. They didn't question and weren't there to question, they were there to be taught what to believe. I remember thinking at the time this is no different than when I attended bible camp as a kid. I think Ed Deak would agree modern economic teaching is just the instilling of faith.
Anyway, in the end John, almost all of us here are on the same side politically.
RickW
1 year ago
lynn
Would it be more appropo to call it agnosticism rather than sociopathy?
RickW
1 year ago
Amrose Bierce:
"Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum"
(I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)
lynn
1 year ago
RickW
Perhaps.
It has certainly caused controversy and I understand why.
It has for the most part been taken out of context of what I originally replying to to Booker about.
When I was answering that question from Booker I was replying in terms of an "e=mc2/scientif safely sealed bottle" allusion.... and as I have explained before I was using a metaphor to indicate the difference between Man sleeping in isolation from Science.... and Man getting into bed with Science if no ground rules/values are established as to expected behavior.
You are then in bed with Someone who (through no fault of his own) doesn't care a whit about you, who has no ability to empathize. That is a dangerous position for Man to place himself in.
I know Science has much potential for good, but we were discussing the need Man eventually has to assign values to Science... as on its own, Science cannot be driven by any moral or ethical bias if it is to remain good science.
Now remember this is just metaphor.....
So, Man when he decides to sleep in bed with Science, we really have no choice, but to assign those values because according to the rules of scientific methodology science must have no bias, morals or ethics. It must not care.
Precisely because of that, Man must care - despite all the contradictions and complexities that that intervention causes..... by creating bias in a method that was originally designed to be protected against that very thing.
John Greg
1 year ago
Frank asks:
But that has nothing, or probably very little to do with the system, it is a reflection of individuality and the ability, or lack thereof, to comprehend and work with what learning one is undertaking.
My interpretation of the data leads me to think that we are all of us a mix of Nature and nurture in who we eventually become -- so to speak. And in that circumsatnce it is my conviction that the secular-based form of learning provides more opportunity for level, balanced, socially constructive, and pro-humanity behaviours, whereas the learning gleaned from bibles and priests is so much more rigid, ideological, restricted, and doctrinal that it limits the very initial opportunity for balance right from the get-go.
So, the essential difference here is that of opportunity. What one then does with what one has learned, whether it comes from bibles and priests, or whether it comes from secular sources, we have no control over.
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
Lynn...
"... he is calling the co-option of Reason by self-interest as evil..."
Pretty close.
But self interest can compel virtuousness in asking us to be honest with one another, just and fair with one another, treat each other with kindness, etc too. Both Kant (Reason) and Jesus (Faith) suggested this when one said "Imagine if everyone did it..." and the other, "Imagine how you would feel...". Even Rawls (Reason) says Justice must "roleplay" by imagining that “we don't know our place in this world, so what kind of rules would we devise to make it just?"
Note though, that all these value systems are predicated on *beliefs in abstraction* - or projections "outside oneself".
As an aside : Is it not at least a little ironic that "Reason" demonstrates itself via the same principles as Faith in saying - "get yourself out of the way"? (maybe it's because Reason and Faith are the same thing ...)
Likewise, all these human created systems (heh) require a shift in consciousness to determine personal behaviour and more relevant, they’re predicated on each of us being able to *conceive ourselves within a greater, cooperative whole.*
Not a competitive one.
Money skews and alters this ability towards empathy and broader conceptions of society, which is why love of money - above all other values - is so corrupting.
Money is *outside* us. Money is not an admirable trait of character (virtue) like honesty, generosity, courage, kindness, etc - but it can(and does) alter that character, those traits, and further, our society. There is nothing about money that permits us insight or demonstrates the "good" quality of a person. It is "indifferent" - which is not a virtue at all, since virtues are by nature, the “good”.
When "indifferent" money becomes the guiding value (ie: the measure against all other values), it supplants others in whichever system we lay claim to and destroys first that system, and then the society upon which it is based. The "good" is obscured, chased out by love of the "indifference" that is money. And the necessity of virtue as a means of cohesion within society withers away, replaced by the necessity of "indifference".
When science goes to such a system for guidance, in which direction do you believe it will trend? Towards the money - if it has any sense of “reason”.
Or, when science provides evidence suggesting that the result of our value system endangers life, an ecosystem, the planet - well, we’re already up and running on this value system, aren’t we? We can’t just stop! Think of the jobs lost! Think of the money it will cost *you*!
Money is king. "First among virtues."
So sure, says our societies, maybe we’ll take this “scientific evidence” of yours and integrate it back into the system that created the problem (!) in the first place... Carbon credits, tax breaks... but gosh, *nobody will cooperate*, so why should we?
.... and back we go and on and on ...
Des
1 year ago
Atheism, The Denial of The Existence of God,
is just as much an Article of Faith as is the confirmation of that existence. Specifically because you can't prove a negative. The behaviour of theists is frequently no different from the behavious of atheists.
There are those who advocate for either side of the question by excoriating the opposing players and throwing shit at them as well as sticks and stones. Thank God, there are also reasonable people on both sides who make (or attempt to make) reasonable arguments for their "beliefs" in addition to unreasonable smartasses who ascribe smartass fictions to their opponents.
People, being what they are, i.e. imperfect individuals, like to impose personal values onto everything. But we are also social animals, susceptible to the herd instinct. So it's not easy being me. Or you being you. In order to live long and prosper then, we need to restrain our selfish impulses and promote our social efforts.
Sorta like practice the Seven Virtues and avoid the Seven Cardinal Sins. Or has somebody already said that elsewhere?
lynn
1 year ago
Glen Murtz
You have given me much to think about.
Thank you.
It has been a real pleasure to read your thoughts here.
samuidave (not verified)
1 year ago
Varying weights of belief
jimorsheryl ~ "What qualifies you as someone whose opinion can be taken as fact??"
Why would facts matter to you, a person who accepts the supernatural? But wait, for a person of faith, prima facie, the supernatural events are facts so my question is moot.
jimorsheryl ~ "Most people have no idea what the true message of Christianity is"
'THOU SHALL not kill; THOU SHALL do unto others as you have them do unto you.' Two simple rules of life I learned by the time I was six, and I challenge anyone to offer evidence of how any further Christian study can take one further.
lynn ~ "I'll answer both you and samiudave's question in the same way: The School of Neither Yes or No."
Ah, the 'philosophical school of maybe':
Is this where mere scientific doubt of the facts presented does not satiate our need to 'doubt' because there is an overarching doubt that needs answering first: whether the 'belief in reason' model even works?
Or is this the argument where the natural, physical world is incapable of deciphering the metaphysical realm, and it is this which makes our 'belief in reason' model suspect?
Now either of these queries may be true. But what alternative do we have?
I ask, how do you, lynn, search for answers? Is there still comfort in the murky world of uncertainty provided by the broken model of 'belief in reason'? How do you make sense of the world around you? These are serious questions, I might add.
lynn ~ "Glen Murtz, at least from my read of him, is not calling Reason evil"
No, Glen Murtz says science is used to serve the evil of reason, as reason has become intolerant, unjust and inhuman.
The 'Reason approach' makes sense to some of us, so we believe it to be true. For people who subscribe to the 'Faith approach', the natural and supernatural makes sense, so they believe it to be true. Perhaps somewhere enveloping them both is the 'World of Glen Murtz': perception which give rise to belief; life is but a perception, so all life is a belief.
In short, the 'Reason approach' cannot 'reason' without a 'belief in reason' to correctly offer us the answers we believe.
So ponder Upton Sinclair’s old truism “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. This maybe be true, but is that the fault of 'reason'?
lynn ~ "And when the kind of reason the world is being taught to accept is warped by greater and greater degrees of evil self-interest......Then you are teaching Madness."
Here is where I think things fall apart because you offer no solution. Regardless of what we believe, what model can we use to intelligibly understand the world around us if not the 'belief in reason' approach?
'Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods' ~ Albert Einstein
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
Whew.
"No, Glen Murtz says science is used to serve the evil of reason, as reason has become intolerant, unjust and inhuman."
Again, pretty close. It's in there somewhere I think! :)
Evil is anti-existence. And indifference makes the position of anti-existence all the more possible. Living things are devalued simply for being, by money, which is indifference personified.
To reiterate and clairify (and add a crucial component that was kinda nagging at me for having failed to link up in my previous post):
Reason designates self interest as meeting the definition of rational thought. Self interest uses virtues (qualities of character or behaviour) as the means by which we interact to create harmonious communities. (the 'rules' of engagement) Like reason, all religions I'm aware of utilize a similar method of "being outside oneself" to instill considerations of a 'greater good' which serves the individual's interests as well. (my previous post)
We may, I suggest, reasonably make the case that the *underlying exchange mechanism* to create society is 'reason' or 'faith' as conceived in the attributes or behaviours we would desire were applied to, or available to us. We want to be treated justly, we want people to be honest, kind, etc and so, we would do well to practice or acquire these traits too. Crucially, we seek the demonstration and *exchange* of these values.
Now - what is the primary exchange mechanism in a society that uses 'market' principles as its organizing concept?
Money.
(This is the crucial step of how money 'drives out' other virtues that I failed to integrate in the previous post - you make a society organized around monetary considerations - a "free" market... and now precedence of values changes dramatically)
Such a society would not incline towards precepts like "show honesty" or "show courage" or "show me kindness", or "show me justice" or any old fashioned shit like that - but instead, "show me the money".
And love of money above all else is evil. (my previous post)
By organizing our society around a value system that places money as its root cause, we have become an evil society.
And that's not rhetoric - I genuinely believe it.
This is why I don't believe 'left' or 'right' politics has anything to offer. Zero. Nothing. Endless yapping about the right way to go about killing everything. Quite literally, retarded ideas of how to spread poison more equitably...
At least some religions understood how societies are destroyed by "values" outside those provided by *life* and the *living*. We “reasonable” people don’t even see it eating us alive.
and lynn - thank you.
happy
1 year ago
Lets dumb this down to my level
Its all very simple to me. There are multiple religions made up, what, hundreds at least, of different sects.
And every single one of those claim they, and they alone, are their gods chosen, and their interpetation of the "good book" or what ever it is they follow is the only True Path.
Some religions say do not kill, others say killing non believers is excusable.
So duke it out between yourselves, get your shit together, and when you can get back to me with a single united front on what religion actually is we can have a intelligent discussion on the merits of science versus religion.
Deal?
samuidave (not verified)
1 year ago
Glen Murtz, lynn...
... thanks for sharing your views. I took a little more interest than I may have because I was confronted a year ago by an old friend who made the same sort of assertions.
LINK
In the end, I remain wholly unconvinced of the merit in approaching both reason and faith as belief systems.
The conflict between faith and reason is not an illusion nor an invention; the conflict exists because it must. We need frames of reference as a foundation to our learning. This is the way the human brain processes information. With an easily recognizable cleavage between faith and reason, we naturally divide them.
Reason and logic fall short of explaining the human complexities of morality. But so does religion; and, to the best of my knowledge, religion makes no inroads at all into any other area of examination.
The proclamation that religion alone offers a profound insight into morality simply fails to satisfy even the least strenuous examination. However, what is said in a few words about "thou shall not kill" and "do unto others...", would, if strictly followed, undoubtedly bring our existence on this planet to a higher plane. But these two moral principles are not accessible only by faith.
On that note, I will gladly abandon the faulty methodology of reason, tempered with the two moral principles as my guide just, as soon as a better way to go through life is available. I am open to suggestions. :)
Frank
1 year ago
John Greg
"And in that circumsatnce it is my conviction that the secular-based form of learning provides more opportunity for level, balanced, socially constructive, and pro-humanity behaviours, whereas the learning gleaned from bibles and priests is so much more rigid, ideological, restricted, and doctrinal that it limits the very initial opportunity for balance right from the get-go."
I agree with you. People raised in a more controlled environment and given a foundation of faith upon which to build their world view will probably have less variability in that world view than an equivalent number of people raised in a secular society where they're encouraged to constantly question what they're taught and demand evidence and proof.
Doesn't mean everyone raised in a secular environment is a better person however.
And over time the chances of seeing progress both socially and technologically are greater in the secular environment as that society should have a greater probability of producing people who think outside the box and the society should be more willing to see changes occur.
As an aside the teaching of economics in North America is much closer to the religious society than it is to a secular one and therefore we shouldn't expect much from economists and not be surprised they didn't predict the biggest economic crisis in decades.
RickW
1 year ago
lynn - I agree!
This occurs when Man treats Science as Religion - and not as the dispassionate discipline it should be. But, this statement of yours describes to a "T" my concept of God. She?He?It? must necessarily be "uncaring" of people as individuals, involved as She?He?It? with running the entire universe. The myriad divisions among those who describe themselves as "religious", consists mainly of super-imposing some quite arbitrary compassion to the god of their choice.
To paraphrase Pierre Trudeau: “Living next to God is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
John Greg
1 year ago
Frank said:
All too true.
I think that is also true*, which is why, in part, I disagree so vehemently with Glenn Murtz, who, if I understand him, seems to think that any rational person who uses reason as a method of thought is automatically incapable of being anything other than evil because reason is, in his opinion, the very basis or core of plutocratic capitalistic greed-based behaviour -- which I think is nonsense altogether, but as I say, perhaps I am misunderstanding him.
Glenn, reason is a process, it is not an ideology, nor is it a behaviour, or a set of morals or ethics. Reason, like science, is a process of thought; an approach to a mode of thinking.
I suppose reason can be rationalized as being, in part, at the core of so-called evil behaviours. But it is not the cause of, or the source of those behaviours. And perhaps some people use reason in some sense to excuse anti-human behaviours, but it is not the process of reason that is the source of, nor the cause of those behaviours.
I think you are confusing reason with a whole slew of other things, most of which are in fact born of irrational, selfish, and unreasonable behaviour that is in fact not based upon reason at all, but only, perhaps, rationalized by use of reason, which is not causal.
There is a type of logical fallacy that you are using, although I cannot remember what it is called, wherein you argue (or seem to argue) that because reason may in some instances be used to justify or rationalize anti-human, hence evil, behaviour, it is therefore "guilty" of being the cause or at least at the root of all evil behaviour and is therefore evil in itself. That is a seriously flawed argument that is even more unrealistically black and white than something like "Either you with us or you're against us." You seem to remove all possibility of nuance from the equation.
Though, all that being said, I must repeat that I am not at all sure I understand what it is you are trying to say. I find Your posts to be awfully confusing for someone like myself who does not already hold your point of view -- if you know what I mean.
*Though it should be noted that several economists did in fact predict, and predict quite accurately, the crisis, but they were shot down and shut up by their less open-eyed brethren.
Glen Murtz
1 year ago
samui... Greg...
"In the end, I remain wholly unconvinced of the merit in approaching both reason and faith as belief systems."
Then on that, I propose we will respectfully differ in degrees. I could never make a case about some of the cool goodies that science has provided humanity - that system has served us well and poorly too, but on the whole, I'm inclined to suspect the roots of reason and faith are deeply similar.
Greg:
"... reason is a process, it is not an ideology, nor is it a behaviour, or a set of morals or ethics."
I fail to see how reason is defined if not by an accumulation of propositions or principles. You must evaluate specific principles to make the determination that something is "reasonable".
I believe those principles are virtues, or refined definitions of what is "good". So Reason and Reasoning spring from conceptions
And may I ask how it is that a process people engage in is not a way of behaving? What guidelines define that behavior as "reasoned" or "unreasonable"?
Can you explain these?
She is behaving unreasonably.
- What terms or definitions make the processes she is engaged in, or the behaviour she is exhibiting, not reasonable?
You could, I suppose, say this sentence makes no sense, since, using your definition, reason is not a behaviour - but I'm reasonably sure you won't do that.
She is reasonable.
- This is not similar to saying her hair is brown - an observance of physical properties. She must have *exhibited a behavior* or *demonstrated* an ability to engage in processes that meet whatever criteria you use to define "reasonable".
Something makes you conclude this.
So what is it? Is it that she has demonstrated (ie put into practice, demonstrated by behaviour?) values you find amenable, or that you share?
lynn
1 year ago
great discussion
Have company coming and have been busy doing exotic stuff like cleaning house - I will have to make this short and it will probably be clumsy
siamudave wrote:
"Ah, the 'philosophical school of maybe':"
I guess it could be interpreted that way ;-) but it is more just this:
....still learning as I try to stumble through life as gracefully as possible...
When it comes to "school of thought" my pony instinct kicks in and I want to jump that fence. (Sorry, I think in metaphors... maybe that should be bad metaphors ;-).... and am forever doomed.)
DH Lawrence wrote this wonderful piece that resonates with me, I'll quote from it in part.... and then duck:
Quote:
"Now the great and fatal fruit of our civilization, which is a civilization based on knowledge, and hostile to experience, is boredom. All our wonderful education and learning is producing a grand sum-total of boredom. Modern people are inwardly bored....They are bored because they experience nothing. And they experience nothing because the wonder has gone out of them. And when the wonder has gone out of a man he is dead. He is hence forth only an insect.
When it comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder....
The sense of wonder. That is our sixth sense. And it is the natural religious sense.
Somebody says that mystery is nothing, because mystery is something you don't "know", and what you don't know is nothing to you. But there is more than one way of knowing.
Even the real scientist works in the sense of wonder. The pity is, when he comes out of the laboratory he puts aside his wonder along with his apparatus, and tries to make it all perfectly didactic. Science in its true condition of wonder is as religious as any religion. But didactic science is as dead and boring as dogmatic religion. Both are wonderless and productive of boredom, endless boredom." End of Quote
And in many ways that is probably why Money is now God... as there is so little real wonder in the world. We are blind to it. More importantly we don't feel it anymore. So "no wonder" we have the deathscape of the Tar Sands and BP killing The Gulf of Mexico.....
We shop while the natural world is being ravaged all around us.
Our instincts and intuition, our natural bodily knowledge now deadened, we feel nothing.....and we are getting very good at pretending we care......
John Greg
1 year ago
Glenn
I'll give it the old school try.
I would say in this specific instance that while she is behaving unreasonably, she is not necessarily behaving without reason (following any of the definitions below). But without additional information and context it is unclear either way.
To wit (from the Free Dictionary):
rea·son n.
1. A declaration made to explain or justify action, decision, or conviction: inquired about her reason for leaving.
2. The capacity for logical, rational, and analytic thought; intelligence.
3. Good judgment; sound sense.
4. A normal mental state; sanity: He has lost his reason.
5. Logic A premise, usually the minor premise, of an argument.
v. rea·soned, rea·son·ing, rea·sons v.intr.
1. To use the faculty of reason; think logically.
2. To talk or argue logically and persuasively.
3. Obsolete To engage in conversation or discussion.
v.tr.
1. To determine or conclude by logical thinking: reasoned out a solution to the problem.
2. To persuade or dissuade (someone) with reasons.
So, I would say that given the limited context she is behaving in opposite to definition 2 of the noun, but not necessarily to definition's 3-5 of the noun. Now I think we can probably agree the sentence, which I would say makes sense but is insufficient; is too lacking in context and additinal information to clarify the deinition with any more certainty. And I think the same can be said for the second example sentence as well: too limited to tease out a more comprehensive and specific meaning.
I would say that I fail to see why or how values are involved, especially without specific context. In the specific examples you used I am unable to note anything that does or does not express value of any sort. I'm not being argumentative, I just cannot see it.
samuidave (not verified)
1 year ago
religion is not evil, nor is science
RickW paraphrasing Pierre Trudeau:
P.E. Trudeau was speaking of living next door to the USA, not God as far as I am aware.
Glen Murtz quote:
I cannot attribute any evil in history to anything other than to humanity itself. Ideas are in our heads, and how we deal with these ideas is ultimately our own responsibility. Our conduct rests squarely on our shoulders and nowhere else. I find discomfort in looking for, or finding, a scapegoat.
I do agree, however, that there is a basis in which science and religion are similar: they are both used to make sense of the world around us. But the differences in methodology are distinct enough to delineate one from the other.
The problem with modern religions is that they come with user manuals. For example, the Bible, allegedly the word of an omnipotent God, is so fraught with absurdities that it discredits itself. Even a believer must cherry pick passages, offer excuses for the hypocrisy or, in the 'god of the gaps' thinking, and attribute the ridiculousness to the mystery of God.
lynn quoting DH Lawrence:
I think DH Lawrence is wrong to state life is devoid of wonder because we experience nothing. At the very worst, I would suggest, we retain the Marcusian thinking of the One Dimensional Man or, at least, reside in a state of entangled orders of simulacra*. But, again, whose fault is that? The evils of the world? propaganda? poor education?
* safe link to Jean Baudrillard's book, Simulacra and Simulation
[continued ...]
Des
1 year ago
Just a Couple of Observations.
"Fact" and "Truth" are not necessarily the same. Pilate did not ask Christ, "What is Fact?" in absolving himself from responsibility, but "What is truth?" He wasn't prepared to accept the truth, and therefore rejected the fact also. Some people today are not prepared to look beyond their own conception of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or the Skydaddy, or the Airy Fairy.
It is not "money" itself that is evil. But "The Love of Money is the Root of All Evil" has always applied to human relations by putting a monetary value on every interpersonal action. The deception of the "Free Market" is transposing the worship of idols with clay feet from ancient history into modern times. Religious fervour is not limited to churches, temples, wats, volcanoes or the lions' den.
samuidave (not verified)
1 year ago
[continued from above]
This alone is a natural cause of wonder: why we think what we do, and how we understand those perceptions. But to call this wonder the 'religious sense' acts to remove all inquisitive wonder itself. Religion removes mystery by allegedly providing answers; answers collectively shown to be little more than a disjointed compilation of both the thoughtful and the thoughtless.
Similar to your compound use of the word 'belief' (as perception and as faith), defining 'wonder' in 'religious' terms is misleading. Would it not be more accurate to call this sixth sense the 'sense of wonder'?
This approach still allows a creative force to exist, a force that seemingly gave life out of nothing. But to crudely align this force with the revealed teachings of God or Allah or Muhammad etc. is no more than 'wishful thinking' if what humanity has learned to date accounts for anything at all.
Ultimately, what I think really matters -- whether you are educated or not, informed or not, enlightened or not, religious or not, white or black or red or yellow or brown -- is that one must find a way to treat everyone with dignity.
lynn
1 year ago
siamudave:
I don't think Lawrence is saying life is devoid of wonder but that people are - that they have in effect, turned their receptors off - have become deadened to the natural wonder that is life.
"But to call this wonder the 'religious sense' acts to remove all inquisitive wonder itself. Religion removes mystery by allegedly providing answers; answers collectively shown to be little more than a disjointed compilation of both the thoughtful and the thoughtless."
I disagree, I think Lawrence is talking about "the true religious sense"...not religion in traditional terms -- but the religious sense in terms of all that is life-affirming. When religion and science fail to be life-affirming, they fail in the true religious sense. The true religious sense has nothing to do with churches or schools of thought - it is the natural state of wonder that finds the sacred in Life itself.
This sense of wonder, to me, includes Faith. But faith in the human sense....as connection, the warmth of human connection. As when someone says to you " I have faith you can do it.... .that you will pull through.... the power of those words expressing that you are not alone in this world. Faith between parent and child. Faith between man and woman. Faith that we will make it through these catastrophic times. In essence, goodwill between human beings.
When reason acts in accordance with this Faith....and this natural sense of wonder.....that is truly revolutionary.
Quote:
"Religion removes mystery by allegedly providing answers; answers collectively shown to be little more than a disjointed compilation of both the thoughtful and the thoughtless."
But all here who are saying: "There is no God. There is a God. are doing exactly that.
Doubt, as expressed in Keats idea "of negative capability", is an act of life affirmation...." when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"...to get out of the way of ourselves.....to empty.... in order to fill....
lynn
1 year ago
correctomundo
....that should read "schools of belief"
RickW
1 year ago
samuidave
Hence the paraphrasing, which may be described as:
"The restatement of texts in other words as a studying or teaching device"
samuidave (not verified)
1 year ago
Paraphrasing; 'truly religious sense'
RickW,
I appreciate you defining 'paraphrasing' yet I fail to see how changing "USA" to "God" does not alter the intent or meaning of PE Trudeau's words significantly.
I am quite certain that the critical rule to be followed in paraphrasing or summarizing a source is to do so without changing the original meaning.
lynn,
I disagree that I misstated the intention of DH Lawrence in saying 'life' instead of 'people' were devoid of wonder. I do, however, see the potential ambiguity if his words are not read closely.
Life may entail all living existence; or it may be life as we experience it, our consciousness. I used 'life' in the latter sense.
DH Lawrence as lynn cited:
Here, it is clear that when DH Lawrence says 'out of them' he is referring to their conscious life.
However, I did misconstrue what Lawrence was saying regarding 'religious sense' by interpreting this phrase too literally. I admit, I have read only a couple of his novels, and both quite some time ago, and was unfamiliar with his world view.
Lynn:
I still think we get onto a slippery slope, in today's contentious times, using a word associated with 'religion'.
Albert Einstein clarified this ambiguity when he said:
Our lexicon is not keeping up!
[continued below]
samuidave (not verified)
1 year ago
continued from above
Now when you say, lynn, those who state "there is no god and also are removing the mystery of life", I must disagree.
By defining the unknown mystery of life as a revealed god, you provide an explanation for the mystery. But by denying a god exists, the mystery remains; the creator/creative force is still to be determined.
Finally, and I quote "when religion and science fail to be life-affirming, they fail in the true religious sense", you, lynn, still deny the entire objective of science. You need to get it clear in your mind that science, itself, is neutral; it does not attempt in any possible way to be life affirming. Otherwise you are creating fictions that do not naturally or logically exist.
The only group of people I am familiar with who want to bind science with life affirming traits are those from the religious community. They seem incapable of accepting this rudimentary tenet because it serves their own purposes, not because it is a difficult concept to grasp.
I needn't speculate as to why they feel compelled to reject 'science as neutral'; It is quite clear why an ulterior position must be taken by the religious community.