Letters to the Editor
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But we are part of the world.
Try to peddle the vision of a cold, pointless world at a Pentecostal revival meeting and you have an inkling of the challenge.
Scientific knowledge reduces the need to project human feelings onto the rest of the world. It does not change warm and fuzzy feelings in the least. That is, understanding how pigments work does not decrease the appreciation of art . It enhances it in my opinion.
Using the the same word "belief" for cases of high probability and zero probability is not a good idea.
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Media, Corporations and Government
have deeply deeply deceived and betrayed us, this much most Americans now know.
No organization is to be trusted, they are all corrupt and plowing their own selfish agendas.
Thus, we can only rely on ourselves, the first step of which is to establish some basis for meaning.
I am right about religion, politics, and science for MYSELF. Nobody else is necessary to this.
I cannot trust anyone on this planet, so I MUST set myself up alone.
Sad, but this is exactly the end result of what the George Carlin article talked about just yesterday, others collectively sold our souls off to the shills and those shills just betrayed us comnpletely.
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"The goal of science...
...is to gradually overcome deeply embedded superstition."
Since when does science have a goal?
Science is merely a systematic acquisition of facts about the world gained through observation and experimentation. It has no goal.
Scientists, on the other hand, can have goals. And in Burton's case, he has a stated goal. He should say, "My goal is to gradually overcome deeply embedded superstition."
And what superstitions are these? Well from his article, in which he mentions fundamentalism and Pentacostalism, it's pretty easy to tell what beliefs he considers to be superstition: that there is a God who revealed himself through Jesus Christ.
Peace,
Xy
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Uncertainty can also be a "conservative" trait
For those interested in intellectual history, I suggest one consider Michel Montaigne, whose thought is as follows. Since we cannot know anything for certain--about, for example, relgion or ethics--we are better off believing what we were taught as children.
Funny, that in praising an article about uncertainty so many people fly the flags of their ideological convictions like crusade banners.
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Spirituality, the way I see it.
Honest spirituality:
It is an attempt to build an equivelancy in importance between the real and the imagined.
This isn't as bad as it sounds.
The real, hard physical world is based around what is, and what was. Man is biologically incapable of flight.
Now to take us further than that, to what should be and what will be, we use our imaginations. Man, through the application of his knowledge and his imagination, created a machine in order to fly.
With a synthesis between the two, what we know and what we imagine, we end up with spirituality.
Dishonest spirituality:
A mechanism used by psychological quacks, conmen and frauds to seperate you from your money or otherwise avoid scrutiny.
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certainty is relative
it is part of the western tradition to be doubtful. when you compare our certainty, even the certainty of the most conservative of us, to the certainty of islam, you will see instantly that followers of islam are much more certain than we are. the idea of questioning your own culture, of going even further than that and putting it down, of being an inside rebel against it, has long roots in the judeo christian world. those ideas are also utterly foreign to other cultures. Liberals are always telling us we should respect other cultures that are far less liberal than ours, cultures with much less or no tolerance for other religions or "unconventional" lifestyles, cultures where it is forbidden to change one's religion. what exactly is it that we are supposed to respect? and if those cultures are as good as ours, then why should ours not become more like theirs? what is the basis for all the letters critisizing us? there is no one in our culture in the position of ayan hirsi ali.
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Spirituality = ?
I agree that what we call spirituality & atheism are certainly compatible ... but what do we mean by spirituality in this case? Awe? Wonder? Basic human decency & compassion? If so, what's wrong with simply using those words in the first place?
Don't get me wrong -- as a dyed in the wool Romantic, concepts like The Sacred, or Mystery, or Transcendance, have always appealed to me, and to a great extent have defined my experience of existence. But I recognize them as useful labels & metaphors for that deeply personal experience, born of whatever is going on within my physical brain & my psyche. And I recognize that my experience is not THE experience for all of humanity.
Perhaps I should have titled this post, "Certainty = Literalism," or "Uncertainty = Poetry." :)
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Overcoming Superstition
xychro writes:
Science is merely a systematic acquisition of facts about the world gained through observation and experimentation. It has no goal.
True, perhaps, but the net effect of acquisition of those facts is that they do eventually debunk deeply embedded superstition.
And what superstitions are these?
Well, things such as "A god pulls the sun across the sky using his chariot," or "Sacrificing virgins to our god will increase our crop yield." Overcoming superstition may not be a goal of science, but it frequently leads to that result. It has debunked past religious superstitions, and there's no reason to expect that it won't continue to debunk modern ones.
Tell me, do you consider Islam a superstition but Christianity a fact? How do you differentiate?
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Science by definition has no certainty
I must admit the author lost me here and there with his meandering reasoning, for example with his (admittedly funny) example of the kite which has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic. But I do think that his exhortations to scientists and those who accept science are out of place. By definition, science considers nothing to be certain. A scientist - or person accepting of science - may say "I know the earth is round" but will be open to proof of the contrary. That's simply what science is, and why it is so successful. The word "know" in this case is simply a quicker way to express oneself than "I think the theory that so-and-so is probably correct", but is meant to express exactly that.
The real test is that of tolerance. No one will get angry at, far less threaten to kill, someone who says the earth is flat. Now just try saying God doesn't exist, or that He's cruel, or that He wants the opposite of what the believer opposite you says He wants. The reaction will be virulent. And that's not just true in religion. People get angry when their political certainties are questioned, too.
That is where this article is disappointing. Why are people so intolerant, so jealous, of precisely those beliefs which are the most debatable? Rather, why are the most questionable beliefs also the least open to debate? By wrongly comparing the believer's certainty to that of the scientist, the author leads us away from that question.