Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
I guess it was a good day for 'ole Beezelbub.
The notion that atheism or agnosticism is an enlightened viewpoint is inaccurate.
Sure. Right.
I wonder what his FReeper name is.
Part of the reason is that there are certain elements of the scientific community who have used science to wage a jihad against society, notably religion, but also business interests.
If you start a war, don't complain that you are losing it.
Uh, yeah, right.
Stem-cell research itself is science; whether stem-cell research is good or bad, or deserving of funding, is NOT a scientific question.
The study of global warming is science; whether global warming is a good or bad thing, or worth addressing through public policy, is NOT a scientific question.
The study of human sexuality & its biological components is science; whether there should be an abstinence-only emphasis in sex education, or some other option, is NOT a scientific question.
From a scientific perspective:
1. Adult and umbilical cord blood stem cell research has generated over 70 viable treatments for various diseases while embroyonic stem cell research has produced ZERO (but has generated potentially dangerous tumors in some cases). It would seem that science would indicate the most promising area of research is not the embryonic route.
2. Global warming alarmism requires blind acceptance of wild and baseless assumptions and extrapolations. This is an area where dogma and ideology are driving the arguments in the name of science, and where any scientific analysis that questions the dogma of the algorists is decried as heresy.
3. The "scientific" approach that these people advocate (they hate the abstinence approach because it happens to fall in line with religious beliefs) emphasizes contraception and actually encourages earlier sexual activity among adolescents while downplaying (or ignoring completely) any of the numerous reasons why it is better to delay sexual activity until a more mature age. The "scientific" approach completely ignores the fact that the failure rate for condoms in preventing pregnancy (when used properly) is approximately the equivilent to the odds in Russian Roulette.
4. At one time the "scientific evolution" crowd argued that to teach only one view in the debate over origins was not scientific because it closed off areas of scientific inquiry. I guess now that their view has become more prevalent in the textbooks, they aren't as concerned about leaving all areas of scientific inquiry open.
As the Warmists make the sign of the hockey stick.
************
Translation: People are too stupid to realize how important we scientists are.
There is faith in science and in everything one does. There is no point studying something, if it is completely random or one does not have faith in being able to explain it. True science and true faith are sometimes the same thing.
I'll put them on my prayer list.
BWA HAHAHAHAHA
Of course the media is all too happy to put 'secularism' and 'science' in the same sentence.
The truth is that there is zero intellectual relevance between the two.
Science is the logical process of analyzing the natural world using evidence, testing and deductive reasoning.
Secularism is just another atheist movement in disguise.
The fact that secularists try to support their atheism through science is just another explanation of their mendacity - feeding off of the 'young-earth creationists' who dismiss science by confusing it with 'secularism'.
Science is 'religion-neutral', and only the most extreme secularist and young-earth creationists would try to use it to either support their view, or to discount it alltogether.
Both of them are essentially engaged in a political debate that misuses the disipline of science and does a great disservice to all of us.
Science and religion are completely separate philosophical dicliplines, one of which attempts to discovery the mechanism of creation and how things work, and the other one of which is concerned with setting moral principles for life and laying out a plan for the personal salvation of individuals.
The result of this debate is that the learning discipline of science is distorted or villified by both sides.
Scientists who happen to be atheists are just as guilty of this as the 'know-nothing young-earth creationists'.
Just goes to show that politics is no way to conduct scientific analysis, which relies on testable data and research, rather than a philosophical point of view about human nature and human existence which the secularists and creationists are at war over.
There is no contradiction with being a scientist and believing in a Christian God.
But there 'scientific young-earth creationism' is an oxymoron every bit as much as 'secularist science' is.
Science without religion is boring.
Much of the problem is based on what science is: a game of strict rules.
A good analogy is chess. If you play with chess pieces on a chess board, and follow the rules of chess, then you are playing chess. But that's all you have done. If you make the false assumption that by playing a game of chess, you somehow divine reality, like casting I-Ching, then you are mistaken. And if you don't follow the rules, you haven't played chess.
Science behaves in the same way. An experiment is set up with strict rules. If you follow those rules, you should get the same results every time, as if you played the same game of chess the same way. Anyone, anywhere else in the world should also be able to do exactly what you did.
And if they can and do, it is scientifically valid. AND THAT IS ALL. It means it conforms to the rules of a scientific experiment. It does NOT mean that if you extrapolate or interpolate from that experiment, that the results from those actions are also scientific, unless they, too, are conducted by the rules of science.
But looking at the game of chess again, even if you play that same game of chess a thousand times, and it comes out exactly the same way every time, it in no way changes reality, or even interprets reality. This is because the game is just an absract, as are the pieces, the board, and the rules.
And while abstracts, like mathematics, for example, may seem to be gosh-darned accurate, they do not define reality, they just explain it well, with the accuracy of a game played a thousand times.
But people are convinced that science is so much more than just a game. That it actually defines reality. And this mistaken belief both corrupts science itself from within, and leads people to try and interject non-scientific rules into the game, in an effort to co-opt it.
One example are herbs and drugs that are advocated based solely on anecdotal evidence. Anecdote means nothing in the game of science, even if a thousand people say the same thing. Because it does not obey the rules of science.
Now this does not mean that these herbs and drugs are not effective. They may work miracles. But they may not claim that they are "scientifically" effective until they have gone through all the rules of the game of science. That still doesn't mean that they will work, just that they have passed the test.
Even if one or more scientists claim that it is effective, it is still not science until anyone, anywhere on the world, can demonstrate that it is effective, strictly by using the rules of science, devoid of subjectivity. Only if and when they do so, can it be said to be "scientifically effective".
Which doesn't mean that it *will* work, just that it has passed the test of scientific experiment.
So this being said, good scientists have multiple problems. They must conduct good experiments that strictly obey the rules of science. They must reject those within science who try to incorrectly extrapolate and interpolate from their results. They must reject those within or outside of science who wish to subvert the rules to support their beliefs, which have not or cannot be tested. And finally, they must reject those who seek to misuse their discoveries in terrible ways.
For example, a politician who, by analogy, watches a game of chess, then uses its outcome to say that SUVs should be banned, because the chess game predicts that SUVs cause global warming. "See," says the politician, "Every time you play that game of chess, it comes out the same way, which means I am right."
No useful science ever came from the theory of evolution.
If the left didn't dominate higher education, evolution would likely already be relegated to history's dumpster of false beliefs along with Marxism.
Later read/pingout.
But if religion is not premitted in government affairs, why should science be? Science has no more inherent connections with politics than religion does. Science is about observing and measuring the physical world around us and gaining information. How can he justify dragging it into politics and on what basis is it OK for science and not religion?