Mind's Eye Re: Science and religion in modernity

Life is lived on the ground versus the ivory tower of male
intellectuals and clerics.

Our state has been invaded by thousands looking for benefits, for
instance, which has impacted the quality of life. That is a real issue
that has moral questions to ponder.

Our science has proved its power to also destroy through very
sophisticated weapons- to goof up the purity of drugs intended to
heal- to fail to consider the impact of chemicals, procedures on the
water supply and fertility of the land, etc.- our food supply is
periodically recalled as are cars, toys. Ah...but count me as one who
is grateful for indoor plumbing, central heating, machines that
relieve me from washing the clothes in a river bed among the perilous
rocks, beating the rugs of their dust, and so on.

The mobile will certainly change all areas of life- from print
materials to finance to education. It will open up information to
billions. But it also may put certain areas at risk- indeed, great
risk.

On Oct 18, 9:43 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> One thing I found impossible to escape as an academic is that a small
> amount of initial research always turns up a vast literature that can
> only really be used to define a problematic rather than direct
> rational action.  As a young man I imagined science could answer a lot
> of the issues that prevent us forming a modern culture.  My ideas were
> crude and more reading and better teaching would have shown me most
> attempts at this had already failed.  The story, as I see it, starts
> in ancient Greek philosophy and its disdain for public opinion or
> doxa.  The Greek had also realised contradictory argument can be made
> on more or less anything and produced much piss-witter on the virtuous
> individual produced though education in virtue ethics.  This 'virtue'
> was produced within a slave economy they did not seek to change.  Even
> Locke managed to justify slavery if the people were taken in the
> course of a just war.
> Francis Bacon produced a list of Idols that a scientific world-view
> needed to avoid.  I say 'list', but in fact eleven of them are dotted
> about his work, written in suck-up prose to the authorities of the
> day.  Leibniz wanted to produce a language (of Reason) in which social
> problems could be worked out as we might do sums.  Various
> sociological positivisms attempted to define scientific method and
> apply that to social problems.
>
> These days I think the turn we need is against control-freakery and
> ecocide dressed-up as entertainment and economics.  Perhaps unusually
> for a scientist I would like to see religion play a wider role in
> social change, but the start here would involve admissions of the
> appalling history of organised religion as a control fraud of empire.
> The Xtianity of Rome and crusades is no more acceptable than the weird
> tale of the Koran in which the religion is in strange relation with
> history, geography and time.  Our arguments for 'god' or a way of
> living do not have to be based on myths of people meeting the deity or
> communing with him/her/it through talking salamanders or on the path
> second left after the burning bush.  We need something more modern and
> informed, without sexism, 'chosen people' and ludicrous myths about
> prophets.
>
> We have no idea why we cling to this cosmic rock.  The science that
> may allow us to leave and live among the stars  and prepare for
> weather catastrophe (man-made or otherwise) is the same that has given
> us weapons of mass destruction.  We need universal values against
> totalitarianism to allow us to focus our lives in more sensible
> spiritualism than we have managed so far.  Thinking of Bill's UFO
> experience I watched Promethius (the Alien prequel).  A disappointing
> film even in HD, it does put forward the notion we may have been made
> by other beings and concludes (after we routinely kill them by ramming
> their spaceship) with the odd actress playing the main role and the
> head of an android setting off to find who made the aliens.  This is
> only slightly more sensible than a world of talking snakes and I read
> better stuff in comics as a kid.
>
> Slave ants pursue rebellion against their masters with no hope of
> saving their own lives.  There is even an 'arms race' in the co-
> determination of evolution.  Religion is as much an evolutionary
> product as science.  I can point to crude versions of religion amongst
> chimps and such matters as insect consensus and science.  Memory is
> explainable in evolutionary economics in terms of it role in future
> prediction.  With caution on the matter of 'on mice and men', I would
> suggest what usefully separates science and pseudo-science are rules
> and values that make it difficult to lie.  There is no method.  And
> down the line we don't want a world in which only scientists know
> enough to tell other people what to do.  Or a set of priests of
> mullahs.
>
> Anyone any thoughts?

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