Letters to the Editor
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Dross.
I tolerate wrongheaded views like creationism by not going and burning their holders' houses down. The social contract doesn't ask anything further of me. I am not obliged to embrace it or to accommodate it in any way.
You ask why belief is different from skin color? I have a question of my own: Why are right-thinking, tolerant individuals repulsed by white supremacists? Surely those poor racists are just as oppressed by their own odious beliefs as brown-skinned people are by them! Beliefs can be demonstrably wrong, and moreover they can be harmful; skin color and other superficial human differences would be irrelevant but for the beliefs of people who erroneously attach importance to them. If sizable minority of people weren't getting their children the routine childhood vaccination schedule because their reading of the Great Sloth God's Book of Wisdom told them that disease was a curse from the Great Sloth and that to try to thwart the Great Sloth's will was blasphemy, would you be so understanding of their right to believe whatever the hell they wanted? Would a few yearly Mumps deaths be a reasonable cost to pay for tolerance?
As for science creating the kind of technological imbalances that brought about Imperialism, I would like to point out two things: Firstly, that while superiority does indeed breed conquest, it need not be scientific superiority. The imperial impulse was around long before the Western World gained a significant technological edge over everyone else and went on to build world-spanning empires. Secondly, it's amusing to listen to a man who makes his living disseminating his writing over the internet decry the imperial inequality created by insufficiently universal technological progress. That must not be a particularly uncomfortable hair shirt you're wearing, Sir.
Some beliefs should be ridiculed. Simple as that. There's no love or engagement in it.
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It's a thick, glowing-neon line.
That separates science from belief. Other writers have said everything the LW needs to know; I'm mostly interested in understanding the background for CT's continuing flight into detachment from reality. (Hey, he can joke about it, so can I!) As a person working in the sciences, it constantly amazes me how even people capable of distinguishing between fact and conjecture, evidence and myth still apply the logic of post-modern moral relativism to problems best suited for the cold reason of empiricism. Someone's feelings about a particular scientific concept are of absolutely no relevance in the science classroom, unless the topic becomes the ethics of science. You want to talk about the morality of animal experiments? Fine. Otherwise, it's facts, hypotheses, experimental tests, rinse, repeat.
Living overseas overseas for several years has led me to believe that this inability to not view everything as being relativistic is mostly an American disease. We've been trained for so long to talk about our feelings that we can't realize that, sometimes, that's not the topic. This is a big part of why the US has lost much of its lead in science fields. We don't prepare students to do science; instead we prepare them to discuss their feelings about science. In conclusion, I think actually the debate in the US about evolution is not interesting. It's actually shameful. Nobody else in the post-industrial world is engaged in such stupidity. This reminds me of the lead citrate hypothesis about the fall of Rome. (You know: the Romans used lead to make goblets [fact], then the wealthy started drinking orange juice [fact], which reacted with lead in the goblets to produce lead citrate [logical supposition supported by experimental evidence], which is a highly soluble neurotoxin. While it generally doesn't kill you, it does seriously impair brain function. Thus, Rome fell because its leaders drank themselves stupid [unprovable]. My question is, what the hell are we drinking?)
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No - never can get along.
Cause neither one of the two will ever just STFU and respect the right of the other to their own opinion.
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To ShawnWM
If I say that Moby Dick is the greatest work of American fiction, you may disagree, put forward The Sound and the Fury and then we might calmly and logically discuss our difference of opinion. Because that's what they are, opinions. If however, I say that smoking cigarettes is bad for you, and someone else says that they're perfectly safe, I should not STFU and listen politely, because they're demonstratably wrong. That's what I mean when I say that post-modernist relativism is a disease affecting our society. Sometimes "opinions" are just stupidity, and it is sometimes necessary to fight against it. This is one such case.
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You need a good theory for why people believe what they do
Revulsion? Nausea? LW, I'm a working evolutionary biologist doing experimental evolution with bacteria in a lab (watch! you can see it happen before your eyes!) and I don't find myself becoming physically ill when interacting with creationists and creationism.
In my time as a scientist, I've found that scientists (unfortunately) tend to have somewhat flat and uninspired answers to the question, "Why is there such a deep and vast diversity of human belief?" The usual answers usually involve (a) denial of the premise of the question ("There isn't a huge diversity of belief - most people believe what I do...at least most people who matter"), or (b) taking Reality to be singular and fundamental, then categorizing people and beliefs by their proximity to this singular Reality and explaining deviations by the stubborn persistence of irrationality in (Unified, Singular) Human Nature. These theories are boring, not compelling, and not convincing. I think a better theory is that people believe what they believe because they go through long and particular developmental trajectories. In other words, life is just one damn thing after another, and we pick up some assumptions early on, and those assumptions tend to attract other like-assumptions, and pretty soon there you are, trapped in an assumption-web, somewhat of your own making. What you would call irrational superstition in not feeble-mindedness or idiocy. It's a sign of the honest and inevitable gap between people's experiences. You could take a step back and be astonished by your friend -- the windy course of his actual life, the many moments he's lived that you have no access to, the way he is as inaccessible and incomprehensible to you as an ocean or a tree.
I don't mean to make light of your revulsion - I'm sympathetic to it. I am physically revolted by racist and imperialist beliefs and behaviors, for example, and I couldn't imagine having to listen to someone over and over say racist things and then ask me to help them work through my racism. What I would do with such a person, however, if I cared for them, would be to (a) kindly explain that I'm unable to talk with them about the topic because it's harmful to me, (b) explain what it is about what they're saying that's harming me, preferably by explaining as vividly as possible the experiences that led me to the beliefs I currently hold about race and racism, and (c) if possible, refer them to resources (like books) that I found helpful and meaningful, and to people who ARE willing and able to talk with them about the issue.