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clipka wrote:
> Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] npgcable com> wrote:
>> I would argue that, in most respects, it is worse. Why? Because the key
>> feature of science is, "You could be wrong.", while the key feature of
>> religion is, "There is one right and true way, so failing to follow it
>> is automatically wrong."
>
> I disagree.
>
> You may be right with some religions, and indeed most particularly with those we
> typically think of when we hear "religion": christianity, islam, and judaism.
> Most likely all monotheistic religions, for that matter.
>
> From what I know, however, Buddhism for instance is quite a *lot* about *not*
> knowing answers, and I guess they're even a lot better than science at dealing
> with the concept of absence of an answer; they even have a dedicated word to
> represent a non-answer (somethig like "NULL" in C ;)): "Mu".
>
Budhism would have been OK, except someone found a way to turn it into a
monotheism and ignore the bits about "don't trust anything, not even
these teachings."
> I'd also guess that so-called "natural religions" are much less focused on being
> right or wrong.
>
Uh.. Yeah. Was tempted to look into those, and "some" of the concepts in
them are not all that bad. The problem is, its religion for people that
want to be half right, but deny hard realities, because it doesn't make
them "feel" good to accept them. Case in point, there was one guy I knew
who had the shit scared out of him in a ritual designed to make him
"confront" his own inner demons. The method gives rise to sort of
hallucinations, and any fool can tell you that, if the person isn't
prepared to accept they have a problem, making them confront it is
likely to have the opposite effect. In this case, he rejected his
mothers religion, and started talking to the local Demon believing
Christian group, who convinced him he had barely escaped Satan's
clutches. In principle, the idea isn't unlike phobia therapy methods,
which expose a person to the thing they fear, or other methods used to
help them *get to* the point where they deal with the real issues.
Problem is, its cloaked in magic rattles, wax candles, and what ever
else, and if done wrong, the result is worse than the disease. But, try
to tell any of them that, and...
> Also, I'm not talking about who was more effective at putting a man on the moon.
> I'm talking about science having led us to overcrowding, global warming,
> exploitation of any natural ressource we can get our hands on, radioactive
> waste we have no idea how to deal with the next few million years, and the
> like. And I'm asking the question whether the thing we're aiming for with
> science is really *good*.
>
Science didn't lead to any of those things. Science has been telling
people since the 20s that, "We will run out of oil.", "We need better
energy sources.", "We need better vehicles.", "We need better public
transportation.", "We need better methods of preserving and growing
food.", etc. The **problem** has always been that the people seeking
profit only listen when it makes them money, and when it doesn't, they
find someone with poor understanding of their own science, or a
willingness to be bribed, or belonging to the same religious cult (who
insist that god gave them dominion, and would never allow 'man' to
destroy the world), to give them a different, and *wrong* opinion. If
someone tells you the well is poisoned, because he tested it in a lab,
and it will kill you in five years, but you opt to find some moron that
doesn't know how to do the correct tests, and they find no "known to
them" poisons, and tell you, "It won't have any effect", then you opt to
listen to the later one, because you are opening a bottling plant, then
its "humanity" that has failed you, not the science.
> Maybe an "explanatory" model of the world that focuses on moral lessons instead
> of predictions might be of more benefit to mankind. Such a model would have no
> need for being perfectly rational. If such a model attributed spirits to each
> and everything to teach us respect for the world around us and each other, then
> that would be perfectly legitimate.
>
No it wouldn't, since the moment someone worked out that spirits where
not real, one of two things would happen. You "morally upstanding" kook
would have the guy proving it put to death, to protect their position,
or people would start questioning if any of it was valid at all, no
matter how "moral" the system was that you came up with. Only something
based on an understanding of what it is to be human, an animal, and what
you *want* to make better, will give you a real moral system. Anything
based on nonsense and invisible creatures falls prey to people making
shit up that isn't moral, denying it *based* on the fact that the thing
in question isn't real, or just flat out failing to come up with a moral
system that is "actually" moral, even in the sense of what humans are.
Example: How many societies through history, with or without multiple
gods, or one god, or no god, managed to recognize that being gay was
"normal"? Maybe 5%? Why is ours any different? Because we have a lot of
evidence that suggest its BS to consider it "not normal". Yet, some
still attack the idea based, not on science, but on tradition, gut
feelings about how they themselves are, and most commonly, religion.
> And if you look closely enough, science has actually led to what is commonly
> considered one of the greatest cruelties in history: The Nazi-German Holocaust
> - driven by belief in the concept of a "Herrenrasse", which was nothing than
> Darwinism gone radical-fundamentalist.
>
Sigh.. Wrong, wrong, wrong. There was a belief that races where
"superior" to each other long before Darwin. Darwin's own theory
"disproved" the idea of such superiority, placing humans, never mind any
races, not at the pinnacle of change, but just some more or less equally
changed point, along with pigeons, fleas, rats, and cockroaches. There
was a guy named Lemark, who "did" advocate such an "evolution advances
towards a single goal", but like Hitler's version, it was based on the
religious ideal that man was "above" everything else, not equal to it.
In reality, Darwin had nothing to do with Hitler at all, the ideas
Hitler followed where more like Lemark's than Darwin's, and they existed
for centuries prior to either of them writing about evolution. But, and
this is a key issue, Hitler was also a believer in some wacko Sci-Fi
called "The Coming Man", which advocated a hollow earth, and people more
advanced than surface dwellers, and possessed of a psychic power so
great that "children" with it could theoretically destroy worlds with
it. He believed that Atlantis was a colony of these people, and that
Aryans where descendants of them. Worse, there is even evidence to
suggest that many children of "lesser races", who disappeared in
Germany, during his power, died in rituals intended to "generate" this
Vril energy.
The guy was a nutcase, who surrounded himself with other nut cases, and
he would have, given his beliefs, had he had the change, probably would
have elevated Lemark to a high position, and had Darwin shot for calling
him no better than a slightly different kind of monkey.
Science had nothing to do with driving this morons ideas, other than
that it because a convenient tool for them. Same with the morons in the
US with Eugenics. It was religions and belief in superiority of races
*first*, and science only second. You might as well blame a knife for
choosing to stab someone, instead of slicing bread. No one was listening
to the science, except when they thought it said what they wanted it to.
Nor where any of them willing to wait, to make sure it *did* say what
they lept to claim it did.
--
void main () {
if version = "Vista" {
call slow_by_half();
call DRM_everything();
}
call functional_code();
}
else
call crash_windows();
}
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