@zifnab:  Thanks for making me laugh out loud this morning; I needed it.

Bill O’Reilly has to explain his position as something other than insider privilege, and why it’s a bad idea that we dismantle the “straight white male power structure”, hence Religion!!

I deeply wish that Conservative Stupidity wasn’t as profitable as it seems to be.

I’ve been reading Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway and it touches on some of this (I highly recommend it). I think that creationism and anti-environmentalism started out separately and have merged more recently. The early prominent anti-environmentalists were Manhattan Project era scientists who saw environmentalists as anti-progress Luddites. They argued against increased regulation because they actually believed the libertarian fantasy sold by Milton Friedman that technical innovation and the free market would solve all problems.

That old guard of actual conservative scientists have died off for the most part, but they wrote the script for future denialist (e.g., It’s not certain there is a problem, If there is a problem it’s not certain humans are causing it, and If humans are causing it then it’s too costly to fix and we should just adapt. Also, scientists who say otherwise are corrupt and just looking for research grants). I think creationists have just stolen the script from their more intelligent brothers in doubt. In the end you are left with a conservative movement that is not at all concerned with actual objective truth.

Well-played, Zif.

I don’t know if it’s just because I’m the kind of guy who reads this sort of blog or if this war on science is in fact real but, as a young scientist working on a Ph.D. in chemistry, I often threaten to leave the US with my fancy degree and work in some country where the atmosphere is better.  I realize this sounds a lot like the empty threat of “I’m going to move to Canada if X” that liberals often use but in my case it may actually make sense.  There is no guarantee that the US will continue to fund science at the already low level that it does.  Competing for grants when less than one in ten applications is granted may be more of a challenge than I am up for and countries like Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore (maybe other S countries) that fund science at a much higher % of GDP looks more and more attractive.  Also, the cultures of those countries value science and scientists quite a bit more than we do here overall.

The US is definitely still at the front in terms of scientific research and I am very happy to be a part of that.  Is it selfish to threaten to leave?  (Finally, please ignore how incredibly self-important I sound)

Excellent points, penn.  Scientists have gotten more politically liberal in the past few decades, which has a lot of causes, but one is that they’re more used to thinking in evidence-based terms, and the evidence shows over time that liberals are mostly right.

An anecdote about reconciling anti-science with love of its output :  I was riding in a taxi a couple of weeks ago. The cabbie had the radio tuned to Michael Savage’s program (yes, cabbies are supposed to turn the radio off, but that wasn’t the hill I was going to die on that day). Savage launched into a rhapsody about the whizbang technology that permits him to do his radio show without headphones (like that’s something that matters to the average listener, but whatevs), and that his radio-headphone-free broadcast was surely the pinnacle of humankind.

In the very next sentence, he segued directly into an attack on research scientists, whom he called ’ sick nihilists’. Without irony, of course. 

So, there already no need to reconcile amongst the wingnut crowd. Cognitive dissonance is all you need, and those muscles are well, well developed already.

And now, I’ve got that Beyonce song in my head with the mental image of Saturn bopping around in a leotard. Thanks, zin!

I am up for and countries like Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore (maybe other S countries) that fund science at a much higher % of GDP looks more and more attractive.

At the end of the day, the only leverage we scientists have over US science policy is our willingness to move to where the money is. I can crunch numbers and develop new ideas for the USA. Or I can do it for someplace else. If the US is the richest country in the world, then they can pay like they are. Yes, it’s cynical and mercenary, but a man has to eat and go to where his labor is valued (for now the USA is doing well for me there).

Speaking of which, you’ll realize that your potential job options post-PhD will improve dramatically if you can take whatever research project you’re working on in chemistry and switch to a chemical or materials engineering department.

I, of course, am completely stunned that the article title is “F*cking tides, how do they work?” rater than “Fucking tides, how do they work?”  When I saw it, I thought that Pam Spaulding must have returned, ‘cause you’ve never been shy about the f word before. 

Once again, reality and The Onion converge.

We truly are through the rabbit hole.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/evangelical-scientists-refute-gravity-with-new-int,1778/

I’m not “shy”, fucker.  It’s a search engine thing. Grown-up stuff; you wouldn’t understand.

...demonstrate your swift recall that Mars has two moons.

I saw what you did there.

A lot of applied scientists and engineers have an uncanny ability to compartmentalize their thinking about the world, so that it can hold complex equations about optics or structural engineering while still positing “godidit” about the development of life. But what’s sort of interesting about it to me is the fact that the old trope—still taken seriously by the jesuits—about studying and understanding the natural world because it is g*d’s creation and by golly you ought to take it as seriously as you take any other text authored by your deity, is pretty much gone. The creationists and the warming-deniers and so forth all feel perfectly comfortable ignoring the apparently manifest word of their lord, or even rewriting it to suit their beliefs of the moment.

An odd side effect is that O’Reilly and his ilk can posture themselves as being *anti*-authoritarian, even as they support an authoritarianism of their own. After all, he’s making a stand against the scientists—“They tell us all this stuff is true, but I don’t trust them!”

Left_wing_fox, a quote from Isaac Asimov is apropos: “[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they
were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

N- its not selfish to threaten to leave.  I hope that this country can turn itself around on several levels, but with attitudes like o’reilly’s I really don’t see it happening.  My brother moved to Singapore because of the dismal science funding here.  I totally miss him, but I understand.  He thinks that it will get to the point where my niece and nephews will have to move to other countries because this one is going down the shitter.  I hope he’s wrong, but when I read the comments on a story about the latest huge snowstorm from my local newspaper and most of the comments are about how global warming is false and algore is fat, I get the sinking feeling that he may be right.

“In the very next sentence, he segued directly into an attack on research scientists, whom he called ‘ sick nihilists’. Without irony, of course.”

Somehow, when you use science to develop new and better means to kill and maim people, that doesn’t count as actual science in the wingnut mind.

Of course, opposition to progress in scientific knowledge among conservatives has a very long history.

One of the best examples I know of from history is the (official) Nazi doctrine that Einstein’s Relativity was totally wrong and must be rejected as a Jewish trick.  However, rejecting relativity, and the other advanced physics that went along with it, meant the Nazi program to develop the atomic bomb was doomed from the start.  You reject the physics, then threaten the physicists (many/most of whom were Jewish) who know the most about it, and then you don’t get the prize you want.  Funny how that works.

And yet, at the same time the Nazis were completely devoted to other aspects of science that lead to horrible weapons.

I’ll never understand the Right Wing Authoritarian mind, that allows one to love the results (cool way to kill people!) and hate the means of getting those results (scientists, who often don’t believe in god and are otherwise progressive, are evil!)...

Possibly it’s less intricate than all of this.  With the Enlightenment comes Industry and the world speeds up.  So, on the heels of escaping widespread “darkness”—living with disease and superstitions that were addressed by purges, burnings, etc.—humans began to swiftly create the means to become “smart” and then relapse into stupid.  Technology is our darkness.  We (the vast numbers on the globe) are ignorant of how things really work—or better, of how certain “laws” keep our world operating.

Because so many of us are ignorant, we still seek after narratives/fictions, to answer our doubts.

We will not escape God as a narrative explanation—it is deep within us as species of animals with memory.

And the truth is, even the smartest among us have had trouble dismissing God because it is indeed unknown “why” things happen even if you can show the “how”.

We are feeble thinkers on the whole and easily manipulated.  The wise among us are destroyed or their voices are minimized and drowned out by folks like O’Reilly—a dark ages priest.

We don’t “let go and let god” really—we let go and let apple, or microsoft or the DOD.

kitten parade: The irony for me is I had been considering moving out of Canada if Stephen Harper (or as I call him, Bush Lite) got elected.  And I did, if not for that reason.  I’m just glad that I have that citizenship to fall back on if I ever decide to get the hell out of the US.

(And I’m taking one of your engineers with me!  Mua ha ha…)

Having another snow day here in Chicago and the small humans overheard the King of the Pinheads.  6 year old pipes up “doesn’t he know Mars has two moons?”. 10 year old replies “I think that guy’s stupid.  The moon hit us 4.6 billion years ago and is stuck in our gravitational field.”

I mention “stupid” is not a nice word, even if it is particularly descriptive. 

I don’t know how my fucking iPad works.  God musta did it.  That’s why it makes all these annoying auto corrections.

And we have a snow day again because goddidit.  The predicted heavier precipitation resulting from more humidity in the atmosphere?  Doesn’t mean anything because it’s snow and snow is COLD and Al Gore is fat.

Having another snow day here in Chicago and the small humans overheard the King of the Pinheads.  6 year old pipes up “doesn’t he know Mars has two moons?”. 10 year old replies “I think that guy’s stupid.  The moon hit us 4.6 billion years ago and is stuck in our gravitational field.”

Your kids sound like my kids—they make the same sort of remarks when we’ve go the radio on one of the many idiot channels for entertainment on long roadtrips (we don’t purposely subject the kids to that—they both have their own ipod which they’re supposed to be listening to when we’re amusing ourselves making fun of radio assholes, but they do sometimes overhear). 

Of course, my kids are doomed, having a physics/astronomy prof as a mother and an electrical engineer as a dad, both atheists and my little heathens have been to church exactly once in their lives (other than weddings and funerals).  They *will* be little science nerds.  Or, if not, they will at least be well educated in the sciences and have a general understanding of how things work.

...but how could the Moon hit the Earth 4.6 billion years ago if the Earth is only 6,000-years old?

Liberal response:  Well, maybe the Earth is way more than 6,000-years old!  That might help to explain a whole bunch of other weird stuff we’ve noticed, like how the east coast of South America fits like a jigsaw puzzle piece into the west coast of Africa!  It also might help explain how there was enough time for life to evolve.  Let’s do some more research and see what we can find out.

Conservative response:  Why are those commie-pinko atheist scientists trying to force us to accept their wicked lies claiming the Earth is more than 6,000-years ago?  Obviously god created them both at the same time — 6,000-years ago.  Those scientists are heretics and must be destroyed!  Burn them!  Burn the witches!...

Posting this link will be my substitute for making an actual comment.

It is all so silly. Everyone knows that gravity is a social construct. And not very well constructed at that, since it discriminates based on mass! We desperately need for the government to mandate gravimetric justice!

The most effed part of this is that he went to Harvard, he knew full well that the moon is the reason for the damned tides - this is all an act for “the folks.” Whatever his faith is based on, it’s probably not Intelligent Design pablum.

Zif @ #1.  You win the internets for the week.  That is effing genius.  I wish I could watch someone say that to Bill O’Reilly.

I sometimes still find that people on the liberal, or at least thoughtful, side of the fence still think that global warming denialism and creationism are discrete things borne out of an emotional need not to believe either in global warming or evolution, and while that’s true, I think it’s deeper than that.  I think that science itself is under attack, and that the reason that conservatives are so eager to lash out against it has to do with an anti-modernist bent.

Another reason, IMO, is the need for many (not all!) conservatives, especially conservative politicians like my own Stephen Harper, to be able to continually reject statistics, facts, etc in order to sustain traditional agendas and appeal to their base. From ecological questions to needle exchanges to capital punishment to sex education, the stats/studies WORLDWIDE provide more than enough evidence that the typical progressive stance on such issues are more accurate or socially effective than the typical conservative one (e.g. only someone who isn’t read up on the subject still believes the death penalty deters crime or that sex ed contributes to rather than prevents unwanted pregnancies and STD transmission, and yet…). It absolutely suits such politicians to cast as many aspersions on science and experts as possible—because the facts are so incredibly inconvenient.

Two sides of the same coin, I guess.

N (at #6):  You shouldn’t “threaten”.  “Threats” are never a good idea.  But it’s possible that you should leave the country.  After a while of working elsewhere, you might even a) come to like it there, or b) get a good offer from somewhere in the US that still has science money.

As to the question of why religion continues to thrive, I have often wondered about it.  I learned in my first college psych course where religion came from, but I just do not understand why it didn’t get replaced by a more scientific attitude when people begin to understand real cause and effect.

If you’re trying to make an argument that god loves us special best by looking at moons as evidence, then you have to believe god loves Jupiter most of all.

Blasphemy !!

Jupiter may have many moons but Titan is the best. Saturn all the way.

Oh please.  God loves Saturn best.

And Mars loves Venus.  Poor Earth is left out in the cold again.  *sniff*

Although, now I come to think of it, despite the fact that no-one loves her, Earth is a Mother.

Slut!  Slut!

Didn’t Stephen Colbert and Neil DGrasse Tyson explain how all this works?

And not very well constructed at that, since it discriminates based on mass!

Only here on the planet’s surface, where there’s an atmosphere.  In a vacuum objects fall at the same rate.  Once again, another way that all that hot air conservatives blow around causes inequality in our world

I have a minor quibble with one aspect of your interpretation of O’Reilly’s 3 minutes of idiocy.  When he so smugly says “Mars doesn’t have ‘em. Venus doesn’t have ‘em,”  I think he’s still referring to “the tides” rather than moons.  Of course there are no tides on Mars or Venus because THERE ARE NO OCEANS [Note: Leaving room for possibility of water on Mars]. Admittedly, whether he talking moons or tides, his proud ignorance is straight comedy regardless.  Such a tool.

I think that science itself is under attack,

Well I don’t wanna listen to no scientist. Y’all lying about tides and making me pissed.

And Mars loves Venus.  Poor Earth is left out in the cold again.  *sniff*

Sounds like you don’t support the war on terra. Why do you hate America?

@Hornet : But of course lots of moons in the Solar System are affected by tides. Europa even has an ocean to have them with.

Note: Leaving room for possibility of water on Mars

I don’t know, could Phobos and Deimos induce tides even if Mars was covered in ocean ? I’ve always heard they were totally puny as moons go.

I don’t think there’s any problem with reconciling the rejection of science generally with the acceptance of specifically useful technology.  It’s classic double-think, or as noted above a powerful tolerance for cognitive dissonance.  That tolerance is what they’re referring to as faith.  It’s supposed to be hard; the more they work at it, the better people they consider themselves to be.  And nothing is more important than considering themselves better people.

To your last paragraph, I’d say my experience in the Navy was that fundamentalists have no problem with the tech or with the science behind it, so long as it’s only applied to the tech.  Too many times I’d have the same argument with folks insisting that radiocarbon dating can’t possibly be right if it contradicts their Young Earth creationism.  When I’d point out that it’s a simple application of well-understood physics, I’d point to the fact that the same physics gave us the goddamned aircraft carrier on which we were living and working and just get a vague “oh, that’s different” dismissal.

The whole point for the true believers is the challenge of purposefully maintaining the belief especially in the face of contradictory evidence.  The harder that is, the more mental energy they put to it, the stronger the faith.  The stronger faith becomes their evidence for their own moral superiority.  That’s the need they have which the cognitive dissonance itself serves nicely.

In someone like BillO’s case, it’s even more about superiority.  As you say, he has to cling to a model of Old White Dude in the sky as omnipotent because it supports his insistence on his own Old White Dude here on earth superiority. 

But the idea of this attitude conflicting with the real scientific knowledge necessary to remain a military power isn’t a problem at all.  He’s an authoritarian.  Whatever else he professes to believe, that’s the core belief and his primary motivator.  Scientific knowledge in an authoritarian context becomes arcana.  It becomes the secret truth to which only the powerful Old White Dudes like himself may have access- that it is useful to develop military tech would only strengthen the rationale for keeping it secret.  Can’t let the plebes, the hoi-poloi, the mud people, the infidels get access to it.  Why, you can just look around at the scary social changes that have happened as a direct result of people becoming more rational about how they live, how they work, how they view their role in society, how they define things like justice and governance.  That scares authoritarians.

Keeping real truth hidden from the masses is necessary for authoritarians, it is an active goal.  It’s not a means to an end, it is an end.  Just being aware of the existence of arcane, secret truth which holds the key to worldly power gives a thrill to the authoritarian mind. 

The knowledge itself isn’t the problem.  The democratization of knowledge and its tendency to undermine authoritarian social structures, especially religion (the most effective such structure) is a huge problem for authoritarianism.  So they encourage believers, the followers, to embrace the cognitive dissonance as evidence of their own moral strength while grabbing at the tech goodies and the knowledge behind them for themselves.

I almost feel sorry for BillO.  He’s the most pathetic type of authoritarian, the follower who really, really thinks he’s a leader.

I don’t know, could Phobos and Deimos induce tides even if Mars was covered in ocean ? I’ve always heard they were totally puny as moons go.

They’re pretty tiny. Phobos is 22.2 km around, Deimos is 12.6 km. But you’re forgetting that God makes tides, so you’d just need to put a church on one of them.

I was trying extremely hard to stifle an outright guffaw while reading this post (because I’m at work and not supposed to be reading this site).  I am amazed that O’Reilly is really this clueless.  He could spend 5 minutes on Wikipedia and learn all this basic science stuff.  Sometimes, many times, I wonder if O’Reilly is really just a meatspace troll.  There’s just no way that anyone could be this misinformed and still be as successful as he is.  I swear, it’s all an elaborate joke to make fun of conservatives while raking in the money from them.

**Seriously, we all know is more complicated than that, and that Einstein played a role in revising Newton’s theories, etc.

Funny you should mention that. I heard of some wingnuts recently going off on the theory of relativity. Not sure why…they were confusing it with “moral relativism,” perhaps?

What’s distinctly creepy is that, way back in college, I read some excerpts from Nazi propaganda attacking Einstein and relativity in a similar mush-brained manner. (I think it really had to do with Einstein being Jewish, but still…)

Fundamentally, science and religion are not in conflict because the core questions religion is trying to answer science considers irrelevant:

Who am I? Why do I exist? Who are you and why do you exist? What does it all mean? Why does anything exist?

Funny you should mention that. I heard of some wingnuts recently going off on the theory of relativity. Not sure why…they were confusing it with “moral relativism,” perhaps?

Yep, that’s exactly why they don’t like Einstein.  And also because he was Jewish but they don’t like to admit that out loud.  I’ve heard about this too.

I’m not going to stand here and be an expert on the enlightenment era, it is before my century’s research.  But I can tell you the average person with an education was far from stupid and most likely had a fairly strong understanding of science.  We as historians have placed enlightenment scientists on a disturbingly high pedestal because it feels good.  In reality Newton, Darwin, and others from the era (and I know, Darwin is probably more industrial revolution than enlightenment) are not working in a vacuum and while their discoveries were revolutionary they weren’t necessarily as world-shaking as it may seem.  Newton dabbled in alchemy as well as gravity.  They were interested in finding the answers for everything while still looking upon god as a being that helped them find the order. 

The problem goes back in religion to the repressive vs the progressive belief system.  I would argue the majority of the readers/commentator of this blog are not atheists (though the most vocal could be).  Simply believing in a deity doesn’t make you less competent at science or silly, it is all about how you believe your deity operates.  Many scientists are firm believers and want to still see how the world works because it is a wonderment.  The right-wing is only fighting because the majority of their believers are repressed and by offering them science it only causes confusion and confusion is the enemy of the brain-washing program Beck and the rest rely on.  Injecting more knowledge into the system is bad for the system in their view.

But you’re forgetting that God makes tides, so you’d just need to put a church on one of them.

Don’t be silly.  Everyone knows Phobos and Deimos are already gateways to Hell.

Off-topic but vaguely pertinent in the religious-nutjob vein:

Lila Rose is going around touting her ‘damning’ video about the PP staffer in her half-baked ‘sting.’ Bob Somerby thinks liberals are wrong to dismiss it:  http://dailyhowler.com/dh020311.shtml .

I think he’s dead wrong and this should be laughed at. But I’d also love to read a post/discussion about how PP should have acted (I think it acted rightly) and how best to argue with/counter the anti-choice talking points about this.

Yep, that’s exactly why they don’t like Einstein.  And also because he was Jewish but they don’t like to admit that out loud.  I’ve heard about this too.

Don’t forget that he was a one-worlder peacenik with funny hair.

The conservative discrediting of science appears to be a strategy to discredit any criticism of the negative impact of indusrty on the environment or human health—if science is bunk then cigarettes don’t really kill people, carbon can’t warm the earth and mercury in the water isn’t so bad.

The conservative electorate then has a rational for voting for anti-environmentalis candidates, who would reduce regulations that restrict such pollutants.

@#44 catgirl:  Yep, I firmly that’s what’s going on. O’Reilly, Beck, Hannity, it’s all about The Big Con on on the rubes.  [Palin IS a rube, so she doesn’t count. ]  Problem is, they don’t give a shit if they take western civilization down with them.

Jayn, Ayutokamina is right, gravity is a mass discriminant construct, regardless of atmosphere. Objects don’t fall at the same rate in a vacuum on the Moon, as they do in a vacuum on Earth, because the mass of the body is different. One way to clearly see this is to calculate the escape velocity for various bodies in the Solar System. On Earth it’s approximately seven miles a second, on the Moon it’s approximately 1.5 miles a second. That’s why certain elements are lighter than the atmosphere on Earth, such as Helium & Hydrogen, but do not escape from the larger planets such as Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, & Neptune, because their average kinetic energy is less than the escape velocity of that specific body, but greater than the escape velocity of Earth. Mass ultimately dictates whether or not a planet can hold onto an atmosphere, as in the Moon (not at all), or Mars (partially) dependant on the size of the atmospheric component atom or molecule.

With respect to the shape of the Earth, I always thought it was an oblate spheroid, not quite flat, but definitely more spherical than flat, so I’m not exactly sure what Asimov was trying to get at there.

We will not escape God as a narrative explanation—it is deep within us as species of animals with memory.

What does this even mean?

And the truth is, even the smartest among us have had trouble dismissing God because it is indeed unknown “why” things happen even if you can show the “how”.

Uh huh. Maybe some of us have learned not to get wound up about “why”, especially if the only answer to the question is fictitious, and not having an answer doesn’t make a difference in our lives.

Religion really draws its power from explanation.

I actually think the explanatory aspect of religion is secondary to it’s supply of a surrogate father or mother.

With respect to the shape of the Earth, I always thought it was an oblate spheroid, not quite flat, but definitely more spherical than flat, so I’m not exactly sure what Asimov was trying to get at there.

Exactly that. Technically neither round not flat, but ‘round’ is closer to true (and works well enough for most purposes) than ‘flat.’

With respect to the shape of the Earth, I always thought it was an oblate spheroid, not quite flat, but definitely more spherical than flat, so I’m not exactly sure what Asimov was trying to get at there.

Asimov’s point is that from a strictly technical perspective, it is wrong to say that the earth is spherical (and it’s obviously wrong to say it’s flat) since the earth is an oblate spheroid. But it’s not wrong to the same degree; a spherical earth is actually a pretty good approximation for most purposes and shows an understanding of reality to an extent that insisting of a flat earth does not.

kristin @ 57 “Uh huh. Maybe some of us have learned not to get wound up about “why”, especially if the only answer to the question is fictitious, and not having an answer doesn’t make a difference in our lives.”

I think “why” is one of the most important questions a person can ask. Especially as a historian, to not ask it is to merely be a chronologist.

Others have gotten to some of the same points I was going to express.

I’d just like to make certain broad points.

This isn’t a science versus religion thing.  Never has, never will, and trying to construct the social dialect as such will only mislead people.  It’s about progressive and repressive thought.  About our relationships between the inner world of self and its correlating outer world.  Take history, for example.  We never complain about how poorly people are taught in history, do we?  We never complain about how students are rarely ever taught how to think from a historical mindset with flows of cause and effect and contemplating zeitgeists.  Yet, in the specifics, we rarely fail to note just how historically wrong people are, say about the Civil War and its causes.  We rarely fail to note how people compartmentalize history as it actually is, from the history of their pastime paradise.  We see all this, yet, we never spend as much energy on the war against History as we do the war against Science.  One thing I always am amused to see is just how much people divide subjects from one another as if science isn’t ultimately history, and history isn’t ultimately math, and math isn’t ultimately science all over again.

We spend our time on science because our sense of power is invested in devices that serve as our locus of agency—like our cars.  This kind of infatuation on power, whether that be a lot or a little, leads to seriously unbalanced conversation on how to resolve personal and social problems.  James C Scott has made a living writing books that touch on this topic, like Seeing Like a State.  If Amanda‘s attitude was so effective, then the USSR would have easily wiped out the Orthodox Church.  That doesn’t happen, and not because people are stupid or are willing dupes, but because the more important thing is liberal thought that is anti-solipsist (and anti-arsehole as D-Squared might have put it).

I think I like Big Bang Theory’s version better.

“Wrong is an absolute term.  You can’t have varying degrees of wrongness.”
“On the contrary.  It’s a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it’s very wrong to say it’s a suspension bridge.”

I think “why” is one of the most important questions a person can ask. Especially as a historian, to not ask it is to merely be a chronologist.

Absolutely, but God doesn’t make sense at all for explaining the whys of historyl. What explains those whys, as well as we can, is factual knowledge about the people and events involved.

Suggesting God as an explanation for the whys of history (and I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing) is frankly even more stupid than suggesting God as a explanation for the whys of cosmology and human existence.

Who am I? Why do I exist? Who are you and why do you exist? What does it all mean? Why does anything exist?

Why not?

Shah8 @ 62

But history is not science. The Positivists of the 19th Century tried to do that and it led to Determinism.

It is impossible to artificially recreate social variables to recreate a historical epoch and expect the same outcome, nor is it possible to account for all the variables to definitively create a model for why a historic event takes place.

I don’t think that version is very good—it misses the point because it’s an argument over what a term means rather than an argument over what a collection of data means.  Any fool get get herself in the middle of the goddamned ocean and climb up the mast and see that the world.is.not.flat.  Educated people have known the world was not flat for millenia these days.  All it actually takes is a bit of shadow puppet theory and a bit of staring at the moon.

Uh, hey EricBlair74, thnx for reply, but that’s too messed up to respond to coherently?  The Positivists?  And I completely don’t understand why you’re trying to make that point in that second para…

I’m not saying scientists can do history better than historians.  I’m simply saying that all exploration of human thought are intimately related to one another.  In the sense of, say, reading von Humboldt’s journals of his S America travels.

Shah 8

Nor was I saying scientists can do history better that historians. What you wrote made it read like History = Science and that is complete BS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism#Comte.27s_positivism

@Jayn at 63: Thanks for that.  I’m going to have to remember that.  It’s certainly true that you’re much less likely to get bad results tossing a tomato in your veggie stew than trying to drive across the Hudson on one.

This isn’t a science versus religion thing.

But it is a Religion versus Science thing, and pretending otherwise will prove fatal.

I think the answer is that they don’t really care *that* much about weapons research, or they wouldn’t have slowed all defense-oriented research to a crawl by failing to pass a defense budget (or any other type of budget).

  Funny you should mention that. I heard of some wingnuts recently going off on the theory of relativity. Not sure why…they were confusing it with “moral relativism,” perhaps?

Yep, that’s exactly why they don’t like Einstein.  And also because he was Jewish but they don’t like to admit that out loud.  I’ve heard about this too.
Comment #49: catgirl on 02/03 at 03:11 PM

This is not all that recent.  The entry on relativity on conservapedia has been there since 2007, and is based on existing crackpottery, viz:

Relativity requires that the speed of light be constant across time and for all observers.

If instead the speed of light is not a constant, you can have young earth creationism with the speed of light being much faster in Biblical times.  Google “distant starlight problem” for hilarity.  Also, radiometric dating is no longer “valid” in that worldview.

It is not wrong to say that tomatoes are vegetables, because they are vegetables.  Fruit and vegetable are not mutually exclusive categories, and many foods fall into both, including tomatoes but also pretty much any non-sweet vegetable that has seeds, such as peppers, cucumbers, and squash.

Shah8 @ 68 “I’m not saying scientists can do history better than historians.  I’m simply saying that all exploration of human thought are intimately related to one another.  In the sense of, say, reading von Humboldt’s journals of his S America travels.”

If by that you mean applying critical and analyitical thinking, then sure.  But to apply the scientific method of repeating a series of processes to achieve the same outcome, then no. History can not be reduced to a series of variables and from those varialble expect the same result.

Which is why it is stupid for people to proclaim the current economic conditions mean its “Germany, 1933,or ‘39; or Russia, 1917; or Rome 410 ce.”

“I think “why” is one of the most important questions a person can ask. Especially as a historian, to not ask it is to merely be a chronologist.”

Well, as a fellow historian, I agree that asking “why” is important in history because humans are motivated by questions of “why” and seek to answer them. However, since it seems unlikely that the universe at large is controlled by a being with human priorities and motives (like the Abrahamic religions insist), it’s entirely possible that there is no real reason or coherent explanation for the world outside of human thought. I.e.: a reason “why” doesn’t exist objectively.

I think it’s interesting to study human preoccupation with religion as part of explaining our obsession with “why” (anthropoligically/sociologically), but until there is decent proof that a god in the image of man exists, science should not be concerned with asking “why”. Because those questions have no way of being tested at the moment, and we have no grounds to assume anything or anyone cares about them who is not a human.

And the truth is, even the smartest among us have had trouble dismissing God because it is indeed unknown “why” things happen even if you can show the “how”.

I’m always fond of quoting Marcel Duchamp in these situations (he was talking about art, but I find it still applies): “There is no answer because there is no question.”

You’re looking for a teleological cause, of which there is none. These are philosophical questions for which we make up our own answers.

Fundamentally, science and religion are not in conflict because the core questions religion is trying to answer science considers irrelevant:

Who am I? Why do I exist? Who are you and why do you exist? What does it all mean? Why does anything exist?

And besides (in regards to religion “answering” these questions) how do they do that? What methods do they use to arrive at an answer? What evidence do they have that they’re right, and what on earth should make us privilege religion’s answer over any other random proclamation?

Okay, Eric, whatever, man.  You’ve obviously got warriors in your head you’ve gotta fight, so I’ll leave you to it.

Ross Lincoln, the world just isn’t as simple as two modes of thoughts fighting each other in some majestic Darwinian contest to see which is worthy of surviving.  It’s exactly that sort of thinking that so called “religion” promotes, and this is why I take an opposing approach.  The essence is that the people who espouse the sort of intolerance under the cover of religion, would do so under “science” as well.

Also, accepting this fight empowers religion, in the sense that all bullshit needs enemies to prop up it’s stupid innards.  By far the most effective means to get people to stop believing in bullshit is to refuse to give them the benefit of adrenalin-pumping, hero-of-his-tale conflict.

Ah, Treefinger, your post gives an opening to say something else important.

Science, for the most part, *never* asks after the broad why in the most loaded sense, because the method is concerned with how.

Asking why does particles have no distinction from a wave just leads you to a bunch of math that tells you that your vocabulary is limited.  Asking why does gravity happens or why, if you construct a situation so, just knowing one aspect of particle determines the quality of the aspect in a different particle, irrespective of distance is simply shunted over to how.

Why tends to be worked on by philosophers of some stripe or colors…

Treefinger @ 77

I agree, I think the “why” question, from a historian’s perpective. to me atleast, is more along the lines of motivations and causes, than metaphisical questions of an outside supernatural force controling the actions of humans. 

And as a historian who focuses on race, class, gender and war, “why” is the primary question that I apply to the areas of study. By asking “why is there more controversey about the droppping of the A-bomb than the fire=bombing of Tokyo and Dresden” motivations of the participants and decision makers is primary. And discussion of racial, cultural and ethnic prediduces and stereotypes is important. But to ask “why would God let this happen” or the like is not really history.

Shah 8

Maybe you’d like to extrapolate on you’re analysis of what"s going on in my head.

Bitter Scribe @ #45

Funny you should mention that. I heard of some wingnuts recently going off on the theory of relativity. Not sure why…they were confusing it with “moral relativism,” perhaps?

What’s distinctly creepy is that, way back in college, I read some excerpts from Nazi propaganda attacking Einstein and relativity in a similar mush-brained manner. (I think it really had to do with Einstein being Jewish, but still…)

I think some people can’t stand the idea that Newton’s comfortable billiard ball universe held together by the love of Jeebus is not reality.  People like these guys…http://www.commonsensescience.org

Take a random paragraph from the site like this one:

But the electron, proton, and neutron all have measured amounts of spin (angular momentum) and magnetic moment. These features can only exist because the particles have a finite, non-zero size. So, a self-contradiction of the common theory is evident: On one hand, the particles are said to be point-like; on the other hand, they are known to have a finite size (needed to have a spin, magnetic moment and the distribution of charge referenced in the next paragraph). This inconsistency in modern science is incompatible with a Judeo-Christian world view of consistency where expediency is rejected and contradictions are never allowed.

For these people, when science and religion collide, it must be science that gives way.

Asking “why” is cool, just as long as you’re okay with a lot of “we don’t know”, “we can’t know”, “we don’t care and why are you asking?”-kinds of answers.

It’s all probably like a Monty Python sketch or a Douglas Adams book:  What we see all around us is the answer.  What we don’t know is the question for which this is the answer…

Ross Lincoln, the world just isn’t as simple as two modes of thoughts fighting each other in some majestic Darwinian contest to see which is worthy of surviving.  It’s exactly that sort of thinking that so called “religion” promotes, and this is why I take an opposing approach.  The essence is that the people who espouse the sort of intolerance under the cover of religion, would do so under “science” as well.

With all due respect, when one side is proclaiming that freedom of thought is important, and that the evidence should lead where it leads, but that it shouldn’t have anything to do with privately held religious beliefs, and the other side is arguing that scientists are liars engaged in a global conspiracy, are liars, are subverting God’s will, and should be subject to judgement and overrule by people who disagree with them not based on evidence but on faith, and furthermore, when that side engages in thug tactics to shut the other side up, one of these things is not like the other.

Science is absolutely not trying to stamp out religion. But to pretend that there isn’t a concerted effort by religious funduhmentalists to absolutely stamp out any science that doesn’t prove their beliefs is to ignore the facts that are as apparent as the nose on my face.

Also, Science and Religion are simply not equally valid means of figuring out the universe. They are not. I will not pretend that I think that belief in magical sky god is morally superior or at least equal to drawing conclusions based on observable evidence, because it is not.

Adding I should have said ‘respectfully’ because ‘with all due respect usally means “fuck you.” I promise I didn’t mean ‘fuck you’.

The essence is that the people who espouse the sort of intolerance under the cover of religion, would do so under “science” as well.

The difference between the two being that espousing intolerance in the name of science is bad science. And the cure for bad science is more science. Whereas there is really no cure for bad religion, except, oh hey, look at that, science again!

I usta have a theory that Creationists and their ilk were primarily those who’d flunked high school biology, and were defensive about it.

But with the new data supplied by O’Reilly, I must amend my theory: they’re people who’d apparently failed 5th (or 3rd) grade science, and still sore about it.

With the exception of the O’Reilly-like mouthpieces at the apex of that antagonistic stupidity pyramid who are most probably liars exploiting their flock’s stupidity and defensiveness for their own agenda of )political) power or gelt.

The idea of humans having “spiritual needs” makes me think of Murderface deciding to become “religious” after his motorcycle accident.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA4wsSICTJ4

90-plus comments and no one has done the “that’s no moon” joke yet?

This is the internet! Every single discussion on the internet is required to have at least one completely idiotic Stars Wars reference in it.

Shah8 @ 79 “Ross Lincoln, the world just isn’t as simple as two modes of thoughts fighting each other in some majestic Darwinian contest to see which is worthy of surviving.  It’s exactly that sort of thinking that so called “religion” promotes, and this is why I take an opposing approach.  The essence is that the people who espouse the sort of intolerance under the cover of religion, would do so under “science” as well. “

Sure about that?

Facsism vs Liberalism
Slavery vs Abolitionism
Racism vs Equality
Reason vs Superstition

Seems like the history of humanity is ripe with such conflicts.

It’s true that bad things have happened when people have used science as a blind for religious or ideological ends. But the problem there isn’t science, it’s the ends it’s being used as a blind for. And of course, if scientific knowledge is misrepresented to further those ends, that’s not science anymore—it’s lying, and lying in the service of an ideology is nothing unique to science, as religion keeps demonstrating.

You know what?  The world would be a better place if more people actually read Darwin and his contemporaries.  They are often excellent writers, and people would end up with a better, and more integrated understanding of what science is. 

I mean, when people think that specifically avoiding conflict means agreeing with the agressors, well, then there’s not much hope for any sort of dialogue, eh?  Geez, learn a few principle of Aikido, or just a few principles.

Also, incidentially, one of the major reasons I seem to post in these thread is that the ethnocentrism, it burns!  Religion is not composed of Abramic faiths, ok?

Religion is not composed of Abramic faiths, ok?

Fine. Buddhism is bullshit too. As is Hinduism, Shintoism, and all the rest. You know why we spend so much time talking about the Abrahamic religions? Because we live in a culture dominated by them. But FWIW, if I move to a majority Buddhist nation, and the Buddhists there act like the Sky God cult does here, I promise I will be just as derisive.

Yeah, but that attitude is a classic defensive racist one.  “I’m an equal opportunity asshole”

Because let’s get one thing straight, Buddhist do act like assholes, because assholes are assholes.  Black and White thinking can only get you so far.  If we want to have a real talk about (not with you, obviously, since you only handle slogans) how religions enable assholism, then we need to talk about the broader canvas, both in terms of the diversity of religious thought, and in the terms and context of their times and people who espouse them.

when people think that specifically avoiding conflict means agreeing with the agressors, well, then there’s not much hope for any sort of dialogue, eh?

I’m sure you’re going to explain to us clearly how to “avoid conflict” with people who want to institute their religious beliefs in law and limit our freedoms.

All we wanna do is eat your brains;
We’re at an impasse here
Maybe we could compromise
Open up the door
We’ll all come inside and eat your brains

Since when does not engaging with their stupidity interfere with our ability to stop them from enacting theocratic “reforms”?  Since when does Zombies, i.e., white supremacists, ever acknowledge that you have anything of merit to say other than the slogans their ideology compels all to say?  In general, by the time there is an argument, it only happens because it’s too fucking late.  All enemies talk ever does is distract us from the boring necessities of holding power over our own self-determination.

Buddhism is not what Ross there thinks it is.  Educate yourself.

And “asshole” completely encompasses his gestalt.  No doubt he’s proud.

90-plus comments and no one has done the “that’s no moon” joke yet?

Over a hundred jokes and Uranus hasn’t been poked at at all.

We must be getting old.

I’m perfectly happy to tolerate any and all kinds of religious thought so long as no religious thought is used as the basis for public policy. I’m sure the right wingers are just dying to come to that compromise.

PiaToR:

You didn’t hear of the famous ‘50s series about war in the outer Solar System?

Up, Uranus!

and the sequel:

The Wiping-Out of Uranus. 

I have heard the joke involving teh Starship Enterprise. Chasing around Uranus wiping out Klingons.

But UNLIKE YOU I am too couth to repeat such toilet-humour.  Save to display my own superior manners, of course.

Since when does not engaging with their stupidity interfere with our ability to stop them from enacting theocratic “reforms”?

You didn’t say “not engaging with their stupidity”. You said “when people think that specifically avoiding conflict means agreeing with the agressors, well, then there’s not much hope for any sort of dialogue, eh?”

Which completely denies the reality of the situation Amanda is describing: there is no way to avoid conflict with magic thinkers short of agreeing with them, or at least letting them have their way, because nothing short of getting their way will satisfy them. The people Amanda is talking about don’t comprehend mine and thine; there is only MINE MINE MINE, and any attempt to ask them to please not stomp all over thine is equivalent to oppressin’ them.

Shorter: stopping them from enacting theocratic reforms is conflict.

That’s just it.  Nothing short of getting their way will satisfy them.  Stopping that, is indeed conflict, if in a broader sense than I have a problem with in this thread.

What I am pushing is the idea that there is no grand ideological grand conflict out there.  It’s just basic stupid/ignorant/evil people engaging in a warfare of ideas, which is ultimately about them attaining power over others, to take what they will, or bully otherwise.  That religion is very often used to give their sentiment legitimacy does not mean that it is productive to argue against religion.  Doing that gives the impression that they aren’t (select one or more of the Seven Deadly Sins) but righteous honorable members of their very special group.  Fighting those guys is usually a matter of consistently refusing to be a foil and consistently counterattacking through the *norms* of *civil* society.  Only the most repressive of society don’t have ‘em.  Failing that, then it’s a matter of being organized, well armed, with a good plan that involves minimal casualties.  Like the Battle of Hayes Pond.

I think it’s getting to be a “dare” thing, a competition and a game between Rush, O
Reilly, Beck and others, to see who has more influence. They have realized they can get their listeners to believe (and hate) ANYTHING so they now are trying to have fun with it and see who is “best”, i.e who gets teabaggers to be against the more innocuous / respected thing. They have been against empathy, healthy food, gravity, etc… I want to see which pundit will get teabaggers to give up apple pie!

“I want to see which pundit will get teabaggers to give up apple pie!”

...or who will join him in drinking the poisoned FlavorAid, because going to Heaven is better than staying here with all these liberals…

tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication.

yeah, I’m personally a fan of the irony that in introducing the sentence fragment “Never a miscommunication,” he in fact is introducing a miscommunication. In that I have literally no idea what the fuck that’s supposed to mean.

The man doesn’t understand the weak anthropic principle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

We have tides, because if we didn’t have tides, it would not be humans but some other type of creature sitting here wondering why the world was so uniquely suitable to creatures like it.

This one’s for Bill’O

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppYgrdJ0pWk&feature=player_detailpage

The problem with religion, as opposed to reality-based thinking, is that you can make up any damn thing and then believe it. Whereas reality-based thinking requires that you look at cause and effect, actual observable behaviors and consequences, and generally the world as it is and not as your made-up religion tells you it should be. Religion creates a uniquely suitable environment for denial about the real world and real-world needs and consequences.

We have tides, because if we didn’t have tides, it would not be humans but some other type of creature sitting here wondering why the world was so uniquely suitable to creatures like it.

Fucking octopuses - how do we get them to work?

Reviewing this clip,  Colbert just put a PISTOL in his mouth for a second when he couldnt explain who created god, brilliantly showing the secret fear that seems to underly these blowhards; that they will become nihilists and snuff it if they dont believe in god.

“All enemies talk ever does is distract us from the boring necessities of holding power over our own self-determination.”

Shah8… I would love for you to say something substantial at some point. Instead of writing sentences that read like a freshman’s philosophy assignment. Instead of just sighing a lot at how “omg educate yourself before we talk. Gawd, it’s called aikido” and ethnocentric/ignorant/racist(?) we are for viewing religion as a player in a conflict.

Also, privilege moar plz. I promise the ladies will focus more on “holding power over our own self-determination” like you tell us to (like we’re not already? but we’ll do it without conflict? whatev) when the dominant religion in America manages to wrench itsGodlyfuckingself out of our goddamn fucking collective vaginas.

I have nothing substantial to add, only that after I watched the clip, I though of ATHF’s Ignignokt saying, “We’re the MOON,” during Err’s pontification on the subject.

You know, I actually *have* had a real liberal arts education, that included basic philosophy and basic surveys of religions.  I might not be any good at talking about this stuff, but I can generally follow some of the threads, and I care about trying to get stuff right.

At the end of the day, Bagelsan, I simply have no sympathy.  If you don’t want to follow what I’m saying, you don’t have to, but I *can’t* give a damn if you don’t even do a basic attempt at a real conversation.  As it is, I barely can restrain my inner Dr. Doom at times, and pretending that I’ve said nothing substantial only marks you as being, for all intents and purposes, immature.  When you grow up, or at least, perhaps, when you feel like maybe asking a specific question or offer a real contrast in opinion, maybe I’ll treat in kind.  If you think that’s condescending, too fucking bad.

Anyways, kristin, in both religion and science, the essence is about the spread of internally consistent ideas.  Only religion is usually not so internally consistent, and is heavily based on the emotions that provide those internal contradictions.  So perhaps, we should think of religion as an internally consistent sentiment, eh?  Anyways, the quality of that consistency varies, in both religions and science, and both are subject to serious irrationalities (yes, yes, I know, religion is inherently irrational, think sentiment).  All the time, people make up new religious constructs that tries to tell others how they should feel.  All the time, people make up new scientific paradigms that tell others how they should think.  A religion is made up of a group of adherents who agree with its tenants.  Some religions asks you to believe things that can’t be true.  Other religions do not.  Manipulative bastards specifically demands that you believe things that can’t be true, regardless of whether you feel comfortable or not—this is a major psychwar tactic, just like playing games with concepts of people’s sense of purity, or getting people to be OCD about their natural bodily processes.  Even so, the main thing is whether a religion can actually convince people to internalize its concepts.  You can’t just make up a religion and get people to believe in it.  At best you can be like Joshua Abraham Norton or L Ron Hubbard in the extremes of naiveté and cynicism.  Most well established religions are not their founders or even their major proponents.  It’s just a name on a river of sentiment that pours through humanity, shadowed by the limits of human thoughts and human compassion.  Science, is not especially different, which more people would know if they would actually read more—by scientists writing as scientists and not polemicists that masticate everything for you.  Everything that we know, takes energy to know, and changes what we don’t know.  There is no finite set of facts to find.  There isn’t even a finite set of genres to study.  Everything that we know distorts our ignorance, and we abandon lines of thought, practices, and solution—in favor of what we know and are inclined to pursue.  There isn’t any rational and organized pursuit except what fires our imagination.  We wanted to go to the Moon!  For What?!!  With this in mind, we can’t fight irrational thought by retreating to “facts”.  Anti-vaccers aren’t responsive to “facts”, and you can’t combat them with “real science”.  At best, you train anti-vaccers to lie better, bring out bogus studies that might pass first inspections.  You fight them by marshalling sentiment (does not need to be religion).  You fight them through maneuver, the sort that reveals to a third party that their ideas and ideals, are repugnant.  Show, don’t tell.

Just, don’t go around thinking that you are especially rational because you’re not religious.  Religion has nothing to do with that—that’s why they are so irrational.  They appeal to the irrational side of human nature—which exists independent of religion.  If people want to be kooky, they’ll find a way to be kooky, no matter how much science you stuff them with.  People also want to be rational too!  No matter how crazy the religion is, people are always trying to rationalize it, or deprogram themselves, or leave, or whatever.  Insofar as this means anything, people have “free will”, and even in the ultimately limited meaning, free will is a wide, and subtle complexity.

typed late at night, so I can only hope *some of this* made sense…

Let’s get something straight as well…

I get this ideas because I read books like Bending Science:  How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research by McGarity/Wagner, and I read about how utterly crazy and psychotic people who are thought to be totally and cynically rational could be.  They make reason serve unreason just fine.

I also get these ideas because I read books like Green Imperialism, by Grove, which underlines how completely and thoroughly dependent environmental science was on religion, on romanticism, and literary trends.  Especially on how difficult it was to marshal people to engage in even minimally self-interested but not-personally-profitable actions without religious impulses.  It left an even deeper impression on how dependent humanity is on some level of religious expression, just to deal with problems nobody “owns”.  Even without religions, we’d still have to build a secular theology for many social functions.  This sort of thing tends to underline the impression that people adopt religions for material purposes—other than opiate of the masses or civil control or things of that nature…

  think that science itself is under attack, and that the reason that conservatives are so eager to lash out against it has to do with an anti-modernist bent.

Sorry, all, I don’t have time to read now and hope to make it back later, but needed to put in my two cents about this. 
These are people who aren’t just anti-science.  I strongly feel there is a group of people who are anti-science and anti-education so as to produce a solid group of sheep - people who are unable to think rationally, weight outcomes, even lay out what likely outcomes need to be weighed; people who are then dependant on an authority guiding them through life lest they be mired forever in disaster.

@Helen: it’s a little of both.  Some of them want to be on top, some of them are threatened by people who don’t want to be in a hierarchy.

“‘[W]hen people thought the earth was flat…’”

No educated person in the West ever promoted or posited a flat earth, with the possible exception of the early medieval Byzantine theologian Cosmas Indicopleustes.

I repeat for clarity and emphasis: Virtually no one posited a flat earth. Medieval encyclopedias spell out of the earth’s sphericity and approximate size (as measured by Hellenistic Greeks) for the less informed.

For why the opposite came to be commonly taught in the US after c. 1880, see J.B. Russell _Inventing the Flat Earth_.

The sad irony is that BillO would look sad and idiotic even to pre-modern Christian natural philosophers.

Pre-modern theologians made a clear and sensible distinction between God as *primary* cause of all things and the manifest existence of *secondary* causes—like the moon and its tidal influence—through which God’s will, assuming there is such a thing, is enacted.

*Secondary* causes could be analyzed and understood on their own terms. Hence, a natural philosophy (in modern terminology, “science”)  that didn’t reduce to “because Christ wants it that way” was not only possible, but necessary. Any child can proclaim the First Cause. Mature intelligence demands an explanation of nature on its own terms.

So Bill’s a moron by any historical standard.

Who am I? Why do I exist? Who are you and why do you exist? What does it all mean? Why does anything exist?

Comment #48: YoNoSoyMarinero

That’s phylosophy.  Different animal.

Yeah, but that attitude is a classic defensive racist one.  “I’m an equal opportunity asshole”

Comment #99: shah8

While you’re off wandering the brush looking for red herrings, we’ll be discussing the matters at hand, Bill O’Reilly and his ilk’s willful ignorance and their non sequester answers that they demand that rational people submit it.
I realize it’s more enjoyable to argue with people who will actually engage and argue in good faith, but you seem to be wandering off into different waters and ask us to take broad brush strokes when we are dissecting specific examples to theorize about their root cause.
Personally I think that telling people they’re racist because when examining a specific example of a privileged white man in a position of power doesn’t immediately provoke the “What about all the Buddhist and Hindu assholes” discussion is a bad faith argument.

That’s interesting, because I brought that up because people insist on treating all religions as the same, when they implicitly mean only Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, therefore whitewashing other cultures.  Different religions are abusive in different ways, dependent on the society it permeates.  Helpful in different ways to the specific individual’s needs as they decide as well.  Jainism is just as material to this discussion as Judaism, and it’s an extremely rationalist religion.  That certainly doesn’t mean that people follow Jainist principles and become scientists and philosophers at a high rate, or that the common adherent doesn’t do pretty much what adherents do everywheres.  However, it does mean that it’s more wrong than describing tomato as a vegetable to describe Jainism as a religion that compels you to believe untruth, and one has to take this into account.

It is, in fact, racist, in the material-to-this-thread sense, to insist that one could apply Abramic faults to the ideologies of all cultures.  Try reading some of the writings by British colonial authorities on Indian religious thoughts.

*Secondary* causes could be analyzed and understood on their own terms. Hence, a natural philosophy (in modern terminology, “science”) that didn’t reduce to “because Christ wants it that way” was not only possible, but necessary. Any child can proclaim the First Cause. Mature intelligence demands an explanation of nature on its own terms.

And before that, there was Natural Theology, in contrast to Revealed Theology:

In response to the claim in Whewell’s treatise that “We may thus, with the greatest propriety, deny to the mechanical philosophers and mathematicians of recent times any authority with regard to their views of the administration of the universe”, Charles Babbage published what he called The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, A Fragment.[6] As his preface states, this volume was not part of that series, but rather his own reflections on the subject. He draws on his own work on calculating engines to consider God as a divine programmer setting complex laws underlying what we think of as miracles, rather than miraculously producing new species on a Creative whim. There was also a fragmentary supplement to this, posthumously published by Thomas Hill.

shah8, basically calling you out on your pompousness and arrogance while indicating you are not on point for the conversation at hand does not make Bagelsan imature, ignorant or uneducated.  (Kind of colorful in this case.)  Clearly, cynickal and several others of us agree.
Organized religion, of various stripes, tends to be in conflict with science because the basis of science is asking questions and seeing where the evidence takes you.  Some religious people and some religions are not directly in conflict with this because they do not think religion deals in the same questions or that their religion was handed down from God(s) rather than pieced together by men interpretting God(s).  That said, however, it is not true that organized religion (including scientism) is not in conflict with science since it is authoritatian almost by definition.

Waspie @11:51:
That’s one of my favorite annoyances, too. The wikipedia article cites claims that it dates back to a Protestant calumny against Catholics from the 16th century. It also claims that it arose in the 19th century as part the reaction to Darwin, as an illustration of conflict between science and religion.

I particularly do not care, helen.  I called Bagelsan immature because that comment *was* immature.

And I call some of you ignorant because it’s obvious that some of you don’t know the first thing about either science or religion.  I’m not going to accept a bunch of slogans as particularly material to the conversation.  In particular, I’m completely fed up with the blinkered notion that there is some sort of unique conflict between religion and science.  Gods and gooses!  Religion conflicts with history, too!  Religion conflicts with math!  Religion conflicts with everything!  Because that’s part and parcel, even if not explicitly stated or if disingenuous, of what religion is about!.  If something is all about the unseen world, and its importance, well, it’s going to say that the material realities and cause and effect isn’t as important as you think it is.  Yet people like Bagelsan or cynikal or helen w.h. think they’re oh so tops by arguing with crazy!  Actually trying to understand why people might prioritize the sentiment over reality and systematically starving, co-opting, or undermining those impulses for the benefit of all of us is such hahd, hahd, work!  Making a distinction between people who attempt to use religion to solve a collective action problem from people attempting to undermine other people’s sense of self is a necesity to me, because I want good outcomes, not fucking point-scoring.

I guess you can say that I’ve got religion.  Do you know why?  Because reading the latest models on global warming means that I know that I stand a very poor chance of seeing my fiftieth birthday.  Amanda Marcotte and Bagelsan?  Only slightly better.  There just isn’t the space anymore to be tolerant of petty point-scoring.  It’s pretty much fucking fetal position NOW.  I want the crazies to fucking help, and I fucking don’t want people validating their pathetic persecution complexes.  I want people, as a whole, to recognize the genuinely malvolent and have the confidence to act against or suffocate their ability to act.  Muddling about how all religions are bad or superstitious interferes with this.  I want people to recognize what a prosperity gospel is, and why it’s evil, even when the prosperity gospel is constructed by economists or marketroids.  Yapping about the “authoritarian nature of religion” is a fucking distraction.  We only have a short amount of time to get right with stuff, and just to survive, even as Mama Nature destroys society’s ability to insure, bit by bit.

And yet you spend so much time and energy arguing with us.

If I understand you correctly you would like to see this planet and the societies that live on it prosper, or at least survive, well into the future.  So when people on this board bring up facts and useful information to debunk the absurdist claims of the crazy people who are in the livingrooms of reasonable people day in and day out you’d like us to ... what?

Say that the crazies whose imaginary daddy figure will scoop them off to paradise while the Earth burns are correct?  Claim that asshole Buddhists that invest <strike>100x more</strike> twice as much in renewable resources are assholes so we can prove we’re not racist?

Personally I can’t even figure out what you’re arguing.

So far I’ve been able to just pin down

It is, in fact, racist, in the material-to-this-thread sense, to insist that one could apply Abramic faults to the ideologies of all cultures.  Try reading some of the writings by British colonial authorities on Indian religious thoughts.

Comment #125: shah8

Which is a complete failure to read what I actually wrote which is

Personally I think that telling people they’re racist because when examining a specific example of a privileged white man in a position of power doesn’t immediately provoke the “What about all the Buddhist and Hindu assholes” discussion is a bad faith argument.

I’ve tried following your weaving and bobbing all over issues and subject matters and when I try to rein it into a specific person with a specific agenda you accuse me of applying “Abramic faults to the ideologies of all cultures.”

Really?

And I tend to take your statements of “how you don’t know what that hell I’m talking about” and on “how I ignore what you’ve said” as highly representative of certain kinds of discussions on race, in which someone attempts to utilize colorblindness in an effort at avoiding a discussion more complex than desired.  To put it mildly. 

You know, you *can* read comments 97-99.  You can, if you so choose, understand that people are veterans at fending off the “You’re the Real Racist” tactics.  You can, if you choose, completely focus on how I’m such a racist instead of engaging in the broader theme of the thread.  I’m just as free to think you’re a dullard clutching at a slender thread of impeachment.  I’m that misanthropic today.

“facts and useful information”...

You know…Christopher Columbus didn’t prove the world was round.  Christopher Columbus was refused by other potentates because he essentially put together a cock and bull story, cobbled from the Bible and elsewheres, that the Earth was about the same size as Mars, or something.  All those potentates had advisors who benefited from Islamic intellectual heritage who said “your excellency, Japan just isn’t that close”.  Isabella, and her coterie, fat from looting Al Andalusia, figured, what the hell, couldn’t hurt sending a few ships with him on it.  After all, we’re not the ones who will die of thirst if he’s wrong, and we’ve plenty of resources to lose.  And one more loser gone from my court.

Have you ever wondered why we don’t get that story?  Have you ever wondered why little American kids are told a patently wrong story of Thanksgiving?  Or why the state continues to prosecute a white supremacist ideology via nominally rational policies, like crime or welfare?  There are many, many secular myths too, myths that the people who think of themselves as our leaders and patrons are eager to perpetrate and propagate.  There are many systems of rewards and punishments for people to believe in many things that aren’t true—mostly by insisting that they are “facts and useful information”.

yeah, I’m a real bastard misanthrope today.  It’s cold out there, raining, and the models say that I will be snowed in next Thursday to I don’t know when.  The future sucks.

>>Funny you should mention that. I heard of some wingnuts recently going off on the theory of relativity. Not sure why…they were confusing it with “moral relativism,” perhaps?

>>  Yep, that’s exactly why they don’t like Einstein.  And also because he was Jewish but they don’t like to admit that out loud.  I’ve heard about this too.

>This is not all that recent.  The entry on relativity on conservapedia has been there since 2007, and is based on existing crackpottery, viz:

Relativity requires that the speed of light be constant across time and for all observers.

If instead the speed of light is not a constant, you can have young earth creationism with the speed of light being much faster in Biblical times.  Google “distant starlight problem” for hilarity.  Also, radiometric dating is no longer “valid” in that worldview.

One of the original arguments against relativity on religious grounds was more subtle (and to be honest, required more brains to come up with than the current crop of kooks can manage). I stumbled upon it when I was in university and, when doing some research, found a book in the physics section I had picked up and gradually realized something about it was just wrong. When I skipped through it I realized what it was: the author was trying to use math and some questionable old physics theory to reject relativity not on scientific grounds but religious ones, and the reason why he could not accept it was due to that “all observers” thing.

Special relativity postulated that there is no privileged frame of reference: you can’t say with absolute certainty what velocity something is going, you can only give it’s velocity in reference to something else, and a different observer with a different frame of reference may measure that velocity differently, and neither of you is wrong. But if there is no universal frame of reference, the author believed, that meant there could not be something with omniscience or omnipotence because that required some kind of fixed reference. You can’t know what something’s velocity “really” is if it’s velocity could be an possibly inifinite range of values—so no omniscience—and if nothing could go faster than light, that put limitis on what someone could do—thus no omnipotence . Ergo, no God.

It’s actually pretty much pre-Internet Insane Troll Logic because there’s a lot of rather questionable assumptions there, whether or not you believe in a deity.

As for the evolution thing, the documents that were revealed from the Discovery Institute back in the day were quite open about the Wedge Strategy: if they managed to get evolution degraded in the education system, that would open the door to go after all the other sciences that could question their view of a God-created and operated universe. My own science of geology was obviously the next one that would be on the chopping block, with physics and chemistry close behind because most of our dating techniques rely on physics and chemistry; and astronomy coming along for the ride.

Wait, if he’s denying that other planets have moons, he’s going after Galileo. Which you really don’t wunna do.

How many divisions does Galileo command?

Because reading the latest models on global warming means that I know that I stand a very poor chance of seeing my fiftieth birthday.

You know one of the reasons climate change deniers can make such inroads among the science-igmorant populace? Let me give you a hint: it’s because of people screaming about THE END OF THE WORLD! and WE’RE ALL GOING EXTINCT! and the like.

Which isn’t true.

I have no doubt about climate change: hell, I live in the Canadian Arctic and can see it first hand, and pretty much all the models indicate that my part of the world is going to see the biggest changes fastest. It’s going to mean massive infrastructure issues with greater permafrost melting (which everything up here is built, and relies on). When a mining project comes along the effects of climate change have to be taken into account in the design of tailings, pits, dams and roads, said reports which I have to review. I’m involved in a project that’s looking at the hazards to communities (such as landslides or other mass movement) due to permafrost melt. I’m not actually concerned about humanity going extinct, barring some highly unlikely geological or astronomic events.

But try to talk to people who aren’t as aware of the science, and “Oh, you mean you’re one of those nuts who think we’re all going to die?” So any discussion about the realistic effects gets lost in the noise of people running aound screaming about how they’re going to die before they reach middle age. The real problems are serious enough without going stupidly hysterical.

Chilling allusion there, Punditus.

I want the crazies to fucking help, and I fucking don’t want people validating their pathetic persecution complexes.

They aren’t being helpful. Denying that any of this “global warming” stuff exists, denying that scientists have anything valuable to say, denying that their behavior is contributing to climate change, denying ... oh, basic stuff, really, like the fundamental humanity of the majority of the people in the world ... what, precisely, about these nutty religious types says “potentially helpful” to you? We’re not persecuting them; they are persecuted by reality. And honestly, with such hateful human beings trying so desperately to win a battle against reality—how do you propose we unlock all their putative potential helpfulness? Perhaps hand over that bit of control they don’t currently have? Let go that autonomy we cling to and submit ourselves properly—as they like to demand—and then, from an even weaker position, say “hey, guys, it’d be super if you listened to us now, k? Guys?”

I want people, as a whole, to recognize the genuinely malvolent and have the confidence to act against or suffocate their ability to act.

That is what we are doing. You just don’t like our tone. It’s not like we’re picking on some harmless group with no influence just to feel superior; religious people have all our lives in their hands. Anything from sweepingly oppressive legislation by our overwhelmingly religious (and male) US government down to some guy with a grudge and delusions of virtue opening fire on whichever Other his religion has a godly hate-on for. When little inroads are made on our freedoms and rights, and on rationality and decent science, on medicine and life-sustaining things like our planet’s well being, they aren’t suddenly benign because of their small scale. That shit metastasizes. It is malevolent.

Muddling about how all religions are bad or superstitious interferes with this. ... Yapping about the “authoritarian nature of religion” is a fucking distraction.  We only have a short amount of time to get right with stuff, and just to survive, even as Mama Nature destroys society’s ability to insure, bit by bit.

The only way to “get right with stuff” and (as you seem to be concerned with) figure out this whole global warming bit is a huge concerted effort to challenge dogma and discard superstitious nonsense in favor of rationality and evidence-based decision making. Hell, this is the only way to solve lots of problem—for example, promotion of all that “abstinence only” bull relies solely on people’s religion (and their squeamishness) trumping their basic logic. If you’re going to combat that kind of foolishness you can’t do it without, at some point, suggesting how flawed and “superstitious” it is.

But religion requires logic and reality to take a backseat to random opinions of random dudes, to gut instincts, to “just so” stories and handwaving rationalizations. It’s inconsistent and unquestioning, often cruel, and downright anti-survival anytime it butts into the realm of science and the real world (which it does constantly.) If that’s not “bad” I don’t know what you think we should call it.

But hey, your concern is noted. (As is your panic-verging-on-clinical-depression. Want a hug?)

Attributed to Galileo: Theologians are to tell us “how to go to heaven, not how heaven goes.”

Bagelsan: There are believers and there are fundamentalists. The former are rational, can be talked to, and brought to sound sensible policy. They include reputable scientists who are alarmed as anyone else by pollution and climate change. Fundamentalists are beyond helping, are real threats to sane governance, and must be marginalized.

By conflating the two, or arguing that your moderate believer at base is really no different from the irrational fanatic, you do more harm to the cause of progress than good. And you exhibit a strangely similar intolerance and dogmatic certainty of your own.

shah8 reveals himself to once again be an ass with only a passing understanding of science, and that only in specific fields. 
Chet, Bagelsan and KeithM - most agreed.
Though I disagree that every moderate, or even the majority, will swing to fundie when confronted with choosing between reality and their religion.  Those who do choose reality wont thank those who point it out though, are more likely to resent to the point of hate them IME.
KeithM - I have a project in Alaska dealing with place machinery into an existing building that is on permafrost.  The grade beams of the building are insufficiently broad to displacy the weight of the additional machinery on plain soil.  Oh, fun.  No one wants to hear they have to replace the building if they want the machine.

Not what I meant.  Those who become atheists does go without saying, I agree.  I believe those people are out numbered hugely by another group; those who admit their religion is in error at a point, but keep the rest.  Those folks really hate the people who pointed out and/or provided evidence that point does not jibe with reality.