I think that is a bit nostalgic. Yes the space program was a priority, but largely for proxy military reason.
LOL watch that speech. He says nostalgia is not just fond memories of the past, it's knowing that it won't get better. Let's not let this be the age of American nostalgia.
Regardless, other nations and cultures put more value on scientific achievement than we do. Other countries have scientists--and formulae!!--on their currency, for example.
That is a specific issue influenced greatly by the home schooling movement.
25 years ago was 1987. Man I feel old...
Ooh, can we talk about banning home-school since it's child abuse?
Science is only being drowned out when compared to the ideal we would all like.
When compared to any other point in history, science is doing quite well.
Depends on what you mean by doing well.
If you watch the talk, the point was that science doesn't have the cultural currency it did in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. For a plethora of reasons. Science is still making advances year by year in any number of fields, but because those advances aren't effectively communicated the rewards of such advances (technology) are taken as granted by the masses. People are generally science and math illiterate, and of course America isn't the world leader it once was.
There's a bit of truth to this. Science was stopping clear and present dangers every could see in their near-daily lives in the 50s. Polio wasn't just horribly crippling, it was also really easy for kids to get. That's going to hit you where you live and a vaccine being discovered is a tremendous relief. Jonas Salk meant a lot more to people in their personal lives than the Apollo landings did.
But now we've beaten most of that stuff. It's gone. We get our jabs and don't think much of it. I bought my mother an iPad last year and on our first time taking it to some free wifi, I pointed out that she was holding essentially the device we saw the people on Star Trek using 20 years before: a computer the size of a pad of paper. If you'd told me just ten years ago that I'd be holding that thing in my hands and using it everyday because it wasn't just available on the market but relatively cheap I'm not sure I'd have believed you. But that kind of advance isn't exactly removing the terror of lifelong disability.
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That is a specific issue influenced greatly by the home schooling movement.
25 years ago was 1987. Man I feel old...
I think you mean the rise of the new Christian fundamentalist movement. Yes there are secular homeschoolers, but the pioneers and early adopters were the religious crazies who were fighting a culture war against the very concept of education.
But now we've beaten most of that stuff. It's gone. We get our jabs and don't think much of it. I bought my mother an iPad last year and on our first time taking it to some free wifi, I pointed out that she was holding essentially the device we saw the people on Star Trek using 20 years before: a computer the size of a pad of paper. If you'd told me just ten years ago that I'd be holding that thing in my hands and using it everyday because it wasn't just available on the market but relatively cheap I'm not sure I'd have believed you. But that kind of advance isn't exactly removing the terror of lifelong disability.
But there are huge leaps forward all the time in cancer research, alzheimers, diabetes, and stem cell research is still an utter frontier. I genuinely think it comes down to the fact that people have come to expect such things. Even if AIDS were cured tomorrow people wouldn't lionize the researchers involved, I fear. There really have been no shortages in scientific and technological advances over the last 30-40 years. Science marches forward! It just doesn't have the PR campaign it once did. And I think ciretose is largely correct in his analysis that, for the most part, we don't have a military motive for braggodaccio.
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I can’t be bothered with reading the entire thread, so just assume I made some arrogant statements which some people agreed with and which ticked off a bunch of other people.
Feel free to take me out of context too.
But there are huge leaps forward all the time in cancer research, alzheimers, diabetes, and stem cell research is still an utter frontier.
And they're invisible to most people. Polio visibly crippled people. Even if you didn't have it and knew no one who did, its effects were obvious.
By contrast I expect most people, myself included, couldn't pick a cancer patient out of a lineup unless that person was glowing in the dark or something. I certainly agree with you that plenty of advancements are happening, but they're not freakin' obvious the way something like polio was.
In fact they're so non-obvious that crazies want to stop vaccinating kids.
I certainly agree with you that plenty of advancements are happening, but they're not freakin' obvious the way something like polio was.
BS. I thank god for Viagra every day.
But there are huge leaps forward all the time in cancer research, alzheimers, diabetes, and stem cell research is still an utter frontier.Agreed.
From now on anyone treated for a chronic disease should be required to tattoo the first letter of the disease on their forehead!
C for cancer.
H for heart disease.
? for Alzheimers.
A for AIDS...Ok maybe that won't work...
Type 2 Diabetes already has a telling signature, doesn’t it?
Ooh, can we talk about banning home-school since it's child abuse?Just the 'home' variation?
Heh.
I've known a LOT of people, online and IRL, who were homeschooled. It usually comes down to one of these 3 things.1)Child is such a troublemaker he's been expelled from every school in the district. Sits home, plays videogames, and smokes weed while mom is at work. Takes the GED at age 16 and passes because it's a joke.
2)Parents want to beat the Bible into their kid, don't want them to be exposed to sex ed or minorities, and the kid comes out grossly maladjusted.
3)Parents are fed up with the lousy education their kids are getting, either because it's too fast or too slow for their children and there aren't any alternative schools in the district.
3 seems legit. 1 is unfortunate, but maybe he should go to military school or something (I dunno, I'm no parent). 2 is by far the most common from my experience. This includes people living in cults. 2 is the one I'm really worried about.
But then I think religion is child abuse as well, so feel free to disregard my asshattery.
3 seems legit. 1 is unfortunate, but maybe he should go to military school or something (I dunno, I'm no parent). 2 is by far the most common from my experience. This includes people living in cults. 2 is the one I'm really worried about.
Trained, non-practicing educator here. The student that is significantly outside the normal bounds of what the system is built to handle is certainly the reasonable homeschooling choice. The school system is necessarily built for the average child. There are legal mandates and funding that will help kids with deficits, but very close to jack for kids without deficits or with minor deficits and serious advantages that make them bad fits for the program.
Legally, you cannot give a kid an alternate assessment or alternate assignment unless he's got an IEP or equivalent written up. It's a civil rights issue. (You can do things like give Little Johnny an extra worksheet for more practice, sit him off by himself if he's easily distracted, toss him over with an aide to read the test to him, etc. Those aren't assessments, per se.) The infrastructure is built to handle deficits, though there are hard limits on what can realistically be achieved given X kid and Y resources. Sometimes the accommodations can present an additional deficit. During budget crunches, one sped teacher can draw the short straw and get most of the emotionally disturbed kids. Not much teaching is going to get done in that room, for the ED kids or otherwise.
None of those requirements and funding (the latter is a killer) exist for gifted kids even though significant giftedness can mean the most appropriate education for the kid is one the school can't offer and what the kid is getting is actually a big problem. Some districts are trying to finesse this by writing IEPs for their gifted kids, but virtually all the training is still focused on deficits and you can hardly throw the gifted kids in the sped room teaching the third grade curriculum to twenty year old kids with serious developmental disabilities.
Of course it goes the other way too where kids on the low end who really ought not be in the building anyways get put in so Mom and Dad can have a break.
In the absence of a bona fide major disadvantage or advantage, I don't think it's very likely Mom and Dad are going to be able to match the educational abilities of a full K-12 of trained professionals.
Second thought, one more legit scenario: The kid is imperiled by the environment at the school. Bullying is an obvious case.
My favorite is when he shouts down a chucklehead asking some sort of metaphysical gobbledigook: "what about inner space, the intersection between the environment and the human mind". I'm imagining he was talking about hallucinogens? Like that movie Altered States? Anyway he got a right good mocking.
Sounds more like some kind of Deepak Chopra woo.
Some links to the current themes:
Science, where it's at and the future.
How to build a beating heart
The Thinking Atheist podcast.
Home Schooling: Is a Home Education Healthy
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I removed some older posts. Holocaust denial is not cool.
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Few religions actively encourage 'critical thinking', or teach 'how to think' (especially critically), and I might venture the argument that most teach very precisely 'what to think'.
Which is actually a far cry from Jesus' tendency to couch his teachings in the form of parables, which required the listener to extract the information himself. (Similar to how a zen koan can work.)
It seems like a very effective way to make the listener more personally invested in the information, as he didn't just passively have it dribbled down on his head from on high, but instead had to dig a little and put an effort into deciphering it, turning it into a personal discovery, which he would naturally be more inclined to believe and hold on to. The teaching becomes '*I* discovered this!' instead of 'something some dude said,' and the listener is more likely to trust the information that he figured out with his own reasoning, than 'hearsay' information that was handed to him by another party. (Since many people are more inclined to believe stuff they 'figured out' on their own, even if the conclusions they reached were foreordained and scripted by others...)
I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the more successful religions had teachers who focused on teaching through parable or koan, teaching their followers not merely to accept rote and doctrine, but to figure out appropriate lessons from examples.
Science, IMO, is similarly stronger when it's taught in a hands-on experimental mode, a 'figure out why this works the way it does' sort of technique, than just a dry recitation of facts and statistics, like a history class.
Science, IMO, is similarly stronger when it's taught in a hands-on experimental mode, a 'figure out why this works the way it does' sort of technique, than just a dry recitation of facts and statistics, like a history class.
You can, to a degree, do hands on stuff in history classes. But it takes a lot of work, time, and reading. It's also not so good for things beyond relatively recent history which no one wants to teach anyway because nothing flips parents out more. You need increasingly specialized skills to get a better handle on older documents.
Anyway, it's not as freakin' obvious as it is when you run the experiment yourself and isn't going to throw out any cool bubbling liquids, flashing lights, or any of that.
Paul Sereno, talking about fossils.
The relevant bit isn't until the very end (19 min mark) and he doesn't go into a lot of detail, but he talks about a Chicago area science program that is taking failing students, has a 100% high school graduation rate and 90% going on to college, and 90% of those going into science. The program website. It seems the solution they've found so far is lots of individual exposure to science and scientists.
Oh, for the Technocracy ruled by the Philosopher Class...
So…we all agree that we can not even agree on a definition for religion? Or does that depend on what your definition of is is?
I like chocolate milk!
I like chocolate milk!
And thus is born Chocolate Milkism. Bow before its chocolately calciumness!
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I'm a skeptic, so I think beliefs should be based upon the best evidence possible. I'm as agnostic as everyone else, since there's always the possibility of god(s) we have no way to detect.
Even so, I think faith - deciding to believe anyway, without or even contrary to evidence - is a mistake. That leaves me an atheist. It's a bizarre thing, to refer to oneself by a term that describes something you are not (not a theist), but considering how steeped my local culture is in religions both biblical and composed of murky newage, I suppose it's culturally relevant to use the term that says "No, I disagree, and I'm going to be open and honest about it."
As more non-believers come 'out', encouraging others to think and speak more freely, there may come a time when the term 'atheist' is about as relevant as 'non-astrologer'. I like to jokingly call that state 'apatheism', and think of it as an ideal, because at that point religions would no longer be affecting my life or harming others. That's really my problem with many religions; people are hurt by them.
Most atheists, myself included, are humanists (not nihilists like many assume). We have the same evolved sense of empathy that most people do, and brains capable of ethical reasoning in situations that are less clear. That's a positive belief, not merely the rejection of one that has failed to meet its burden of proof.
I try to love everyone, at least a little. Even those who have done horrible things I try to regard with some measure of compassion. After all, if I had been born with their genetic tendencies and shaped by their environment, I would be them. I don't believe in any sort of 'soul' that makes us who we are, and I don't believe in sitting around wishing for some super-parent to swoop in and clean up our messes for us.
Atheism is not a religion, and I wouldn't really call Humanism one either, but I will admit to having a sort of faith in humanity. It's a contingent faith, as I understand people can let me down and falsify my faith in them, but in this case I don't mind filling in that particular gap with a little wishful thinking. Slow as it is, things do get better, and I think we're doing pretty well for a bunch of balding bonobos.
__ One of my favorite quotes: __
"There might yet be a heaven, but it isn't going to be 'perfect', and we're going to have to build it OURSELVES." --PhilHellenes
__ The quote came from: __
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6w2M50_Xdk
While some atheists approach their lack of faith with a dogmatic vigor, that dogmatic vigor is not fueled as much by the sense that they are right (as you can't prove a negative), but that those who believe are wrong.
I don't know, as an atheist, that I am right. Some kind of god or gods could exist.
But, more than likely, those beings have names. Classifications. Species. Limits to their power. If they're out there, they're not gods, they're species X from planet Y (or some other environment capable of sustaining life). They do not exist "outside" of physics and science, for anything that exists becomes part of physics simply by existing. If it exerts force on objects in the universe, it is physical.
So while I can't be sure that I am right, I can be pretty statistically sure that all current religions on earth are false.
So if you're a deist, I still think you're slightly silly, but I probably won't bug you. If you believe in a personal god who actually gives a crap about what goes on here, I'm probably going to avoid speaking to you because as far as I define the word, that's insanity in my eyes.
I'm not saying that person is CLINICALLY insane, they're just my personal definition of insane.
But I also say believe what you want. Just don't bloody speak to me if I ask you not to.
Deism is just a failure to apply Occam's Razor. I think before our science started developing to the point that we could begin to figure out how evolution and astrophysics work, the 'god of the gaps' was okay as a placeholder. Now if we're going to accept the idea of a supernatural force behind every physical one, we also have to ask what's behind *that*. it sets up an infinite recursion which, while it may be neat to think about, is ultimately useless in describing reality.
Why do we have to ask what caused God?
Because if we don't need to know where things came from then we loose one of the larger rationales for positing god in the first place.
I think it illustrates the point that a thing which purports to explain everything actually explains nothing.
If there's a god pulling the strings behind reality, then what's pulling god's strings? If you say that god is complete within itself and needs no director, then the same could be said of the universe itself. What would a universe without a god look like, and how could you tell the difference between that and a universe with gods hidden in every photon?
Why do we have to ask what caused God?
The same reason we have to ask why it rains.
So, we don't?
If you don't care about dying of thirst or starvation, or whether or not the contents of your brain have any relationship to reality, sure.
Not to mention that, by our current model, there was no "time" before the big bang.
So that singularity of pure energy that existed beforehand (or at least the one that all our models show was there) may have been there "forever".
So the same excuse often used to ignore "where did God come from?" can also actually be used for a godless beginning.
And, here's the fun part, we have mathematical models that prove a godless existence is at least possible.
Where as no evidence exists for a universe caused by a god.
Sure, a mathematical model is not concrete by any stretch, but it's still something that the other side is missing.
People got along before they determined why it rained, so it's not a need per se.
They starved a whole lot more often. Acceptable loss or tragedy we should work to avert?
The real question isn't who created the universe, but WHO NECRO'ED this thread?! ;-)
While some atheists approach their lack of faith with a dogmatic vigor, that dogmatic vigor
Can you show me an example?
This continues to be bandied about, but I've never met anyone who identified as atheist who believed unequivocally that there was no god. Their atheism, like mine, is born of doubt and reason, even so much so that I doubt my own doubt.I honestly think that the very idea that atheists have a strong faith belief that there are no gods stems from an inability to comprehend a non-boolean belief in such. If 1 is "I know there is no and can be no god, period" and 10 is "I know there is a god, I had coffee with him yesterday" then reasonably anything in between can be considered agnostic. I'd probably rate myself a 2.
So I repeat my challenge: can you show me some examples of this "dogmatic atheism"?
While some atheists approach their lack of faith with a dogmatic vigor, that dogmatic vigorCan you show me an example?
This continues to be bandied about, but I've never met anyone who identified as atheist who believed unequivocally that there was no god. Their atheism, like mine, is born of doubt and reason, even so much so that I doubt my own doubt.I honestly think that the very idea that atheists have a strong faith belief that there are no gods stems from an inability to comprehend a non-boolean belief in such. If 1 is "I know there is no and can be no god, period" and 10 is "I know there is a god, I had coffee with him yesterday" then reasonably anything in between can be considered agnostic. I'd probably rate myself a 2.
So I repeat my challenge: can you show me some examples of this "dogmatic atheism"?
Well, let me preface with the fact that I too am an atheist. Actually, I'm a nihilist, so I apply the idea of atheism to a wider range of subjects, so my point was not meant as an attack against atheism.
And we've all met the atheists who seem honestly more "mad at god" than actually non-believers. The guys who spout the rhetoric without knowing the logic behind it.
That's what I meant by dogmatic atheism.
The people who choose to become an atheist, not the ones who simply became an atheist because the evidence didn't line up.
They're the type of atheist who has a higher chance of "going back" to their own religion.
Being that I was born an atheist and never converted to anything else, I only can guess at what actually goes on in their heads.
And we've all met the atheists who seem honestly more "mad at god" than actually non-believers. The guys who spout the rhetoric without knowing the logic behind it.That's what I meant by dogmatic atheism.
Not quite sure what you mean.
Do you just mean people who are anti-religion?And I've never known anyone like that, so I don't know.
I always used to believe...but then what I meant by "believe" and what others meant by it differed. When I used to say I believed in God, I meant in a sort of broadly theistic sense, and when I said I believed in Catholicism (or whatever) I meant that I "liked" the nice parts of it while disliking the bad parts of it.
When I came to the realization that, oh my god, some of these people ACTUALLY think the earth is 6000 years old, it disillusioned me. I never "believed" the way they did.
No, not anti-religion... what's a good way to put it...
Okay, so you know how you stopped believing in Santa or the Tooth Fairy at one point? You didn't choose to stop, you just did because the evidence stopped lining up.
I feel true atheism is like that. You don't choose to stop believing, you just do stop believing.
Some atheists, and I've only met maybe 1 or 2, seem to have more chosen atheism like it's just another religion. They read the books they're supposed to read, they follow the famous atheists they're supposed to follow.
It's like a cult of personality that has arisen around modern atheism.
I've never met anyone who identified as atheist who believed unequivocally that there was no god. Their atheism, like mine, is born of doubt and reason, even so much so that I doubt my own doubt.
Ditto. But I'm sure some helpful person will come along and explain that we're terribly ignorant.
Okay, so you know how you stopped believing in Santa or the Tooth Fairy at one point? You didn't choose to stop, you just did because the evidence stopped lining up.
Yes, but most of us were children at that point. It wasn't that the evidence stopped lining up -- the evidence had never lined up -- it was that our ability to examine the evidence matured. Religion is not, and never has been, based on empirical evidence.
Note that I fully expect to be branded intolerant for pointing that out.