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Well spotted, @CommanderRoss!
That part about ice and how - oh no! - the freezing of water can be explained on a molecular level, is going straight into my chemistry lessons tomorrow. I predict hilarity overall.
And socially: this is what the internet makes possible: even the biggest idiots are heard worldwide..
Allrighty ... is there any chance of the above being written as sarcasm, or for humor? I think it MUST be a humorous piece. Because if this is for real, I shudder. Surely it is not for real ...
And I just want to say please do NOT count me in with this group or any like it. I am a Christian. But I am in no part of that way of thinking. I suppose maybe many religions have extreme groups within their faith, ones who may be too far gone to be saved. Oh did I say saved? I mean saved as in "having a sane mind". Is that too harsh on anyone? I hope not.
edit: okay, I clicked on the Landover Baptist Church link and read briefly. It has GOT to be a joke, like The Onion. Right?
If they could control the weather (sounds like a Bond fantasy evil plan), I do not think Oklahoma would have had this horrible tornado they have just had; it was devastating, so many killed.
I am also of the opinion that this simply has to be a joke. The alternative is too terrifying to contemplate. Even for American religious loons this is surely a step too far on the Sarah Palin Richter scale of insanity. Makes Westboro look moderate.
Anyway dont want to turn it into an anti religion debate as per but not really having this:
Once you admit to believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden you've crossed a line. Dont really see the difference - its just a question of scale. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Whilst I think the actual science of 'weather control' is pretty sketchy this(http://www.globalresearch.ca/weather-warfare-beware-the-us-military-s-experiments-with-climatic-warfare/7561) seems to give the outline of something credible enough to form the basis of a Bond villains plan. Would fit in with Quantum's 'green' terrorism following their attempts to control water supplies but it is a proper grandiose Bond villain scheme rather than depriving Bolivian peasants of a cuppa.
However in the new gritty era would people buy an over the top villain plan where he is creating hurricanes and tornadoes? It would probably have to be more along the lines of altering a countries rainfall which again is a bit dull. Lets just go back to hollowed out volcanoes and nuclear warheads for B24.
This all utter bollocks you poor fool. Dont you know that God creates hurricanes and tornadoes on a whim and that he was smiting the people of Oklahoma for their godless behaviour in having the temerity to send their children to school rather than let them grow up utterly ignorant as He wants?
In all seriousness I find it rather hard to believe that the puny amounts of energy mankind can generate with HAARP, the Large Hadron Collider etc can have such effects and the evidence here is pretty circumstantial. In seismic terms our most powerful nuclear bombs dont even scratch the surface in comparison with the energy given off by an earthquake so to say we are capable of such 'godlike' powers is still something I'm rather sceptical about.
And I just want to say please do NOT count me in with this group or any like it. I am a Christian. But I am in no part of that way of thinking. I suppose maybe many religions have extreme groups within their faith, ones who may be too far gone to be saved. Oh did I say saved? I mean saved as in "having a sane mind". Is that too harsh on anyone? I hope not.
edit: okay, I clicked on the Landover Baptist Church link and read briefly. It has GOT to be a joke, like The Onion. Right?[/quote]
My dear @4EverBonded, as long as you don't identify yourself with such idiots there's no reason why any of us would put you in with that lot, except for the @Wizard ;-)
The lovely thing about beeing an atheist is you judge people on an individual basis, there's no need to judge them as a group. It's only those that identify themselves with a group you judge by what people from that group say. I.e. I'd never blame a Muslim for those idiots in Syria or Egypt, until he/she says those akbar-fighters are his or her sisters and brothers. Clearly those identify themselves with people commiting crimes against humanity.
I may not share your love of an imo non-existent creature called god, but as long as you don't irritate or harm people with your views I see no point in judging you in a negative way.
Dear Wizard, I never mentioned fairies; why would you jump to such a far-fetched example? For you to suggest that is the same as a belief in God is amusing at first but at heart demeaning to say the least, and also not a practical kind of logic. Degrees do matter. With your logic, did you step on ants ever in life? That makes you a murderer on the same scale as Ted Bundy or Hitler. An ant is a living creature, a person is a living creature, you have thoughtlessly and cruelly murdered throughout your life. So sad.
So let's continue discussions of all kinds of things: science, Bond, weather, a favorite martini, Sherlock Holmes, etc. ad infinitum. Let us agree to disagree, and I am fine with that - I hope you are. C'est la vie.
faith i]feyth[/i
noun
1. confidence or trust in a person or thing.
2. belief that is not based on proof.
If fairies are 'far fetched' but God isn't I would most certainly be illuminated if you could delineate for me the inherent logical difference in having faith that one exists but not the other.
This is a somewhat asinine example if you dont mind me saying. Or are you seriously equating an ants life with that of 6 million Jews? I think some people would find that rather offensive. Of course not having any religion to guide my moral compass I can't be sure.
The cornerstone of a liberated, civilised, democratic society is the right to believe whatever one wishes as long as it does not impinge on anyone else (something that does not apply to religion) or cause or incite violence (I'm saying nothing) which I agree with heartily and I wish you all the best in life 4EverBonded with whichever path you wish to follow.
Where I take umbrage is with this oft uttered phrase 'you have to respect everyones beliefs'.
No. I respect the right for someone to believe whatever they want, which is the key thing that sets our society apart from places such as North Korea and Syria, but part of my right to believe what I want is that I am allowed to consider somebody's beliefs risible. Respecting a persons right to hold a belief and respecting that belief are two different things entirely.
And just as we can all laugh at these Baptist nutters so can I laugh at anyone who belives in God at all if I so desire. That is the privilege of free speech.
I think it is best to be respectful towards people of different faiths as well as people who state they do not believe in any faith. I have the right to state this, it is my opinion; just like we all want to state our opinions. One can disagree with someone without being extremely negative or putting others down. I personally do not appreciate derogatory or demeaning statements. That's just me. You can say differently any time you wish. We do seem to express our views in different tones. Well, we are different people.
So again, I do not want to argue and did not seek an argument. I am not trying to persuade others or force my views on anyone. Yet I feel that I have the right to state my views, too. I do not see how my stating that I am a Christian and we will just have to disagree is risible. The ants illustration was only because of your statement about fairies, that thread of logic was similarly off track to the point of being ludicrous. I thought you would have realized that, that's all.
Anyway, I hope that clears up whatever cloud was beginning to hang over this. I want to enjoy this thread, too.
How is the thread of logic stating that believing in fairies is as credible as believing in God ludicrous? I fail to see as you do why its so obvious.
Using scientific method (this is after all a science thread) both have no empirical proof merely anecdotal 'witness' evidence which is untestable either way.
OK millions more people believe in God than do fairies but weight of numbers proves absolutely nothing. Most people thought the world was flat in the middle ages.
The official view in the early middle ages was indeed that of a flat world. As everybody thought was quite obvious, you could see it with your own eyes. Even these days there are some nutters who keep this view.
Ummm the Middle Ages and the not so flat earth ummmmm
* The concept of atoms was mostly discarded in favour of Aristotle's theory of the four (or five) elements: Earth - wind - fire - water (and the "quinta essentia"). In fact, the Church did not like the concept of atoms because they suggested physical boundaries to God's Creation whereas the four elements allowed for infinity.
* The Heavens were considered to be like a solid semi-globe or total globe - depending on the view of the Earth - pulled over the Earth, with the stars and other heavenly bodies fixed to it and complete nothingness beyond it. (A curious notion, for it also introduced boundaries to God's Creation, yet the Church went with it this time.)
* Alchemists spent nearly a thousand years achieving some remarkable things, the fruits of which we still thrive on today. However, they also brought an overpowering sense of magic to the scene, looking for the 'Sorcerer's Stone', which could turn lead into gold, and the 'Elixir of Live', which promised immortality. Yet it took many more centuries before people would discover serious things, like the fact that combustion goes hand in hand with binding oxygen to other atoms, instead of ejecting the mysterious substance 'phlogiston' from the fuel.
...
Sober scientific reasoning was often blocked by some of the most ridiculous arguments conceivable and very frequently did the Church decide what was acceptable and what wasn't. There was hardly room for serious arguments, criticism, objectivity and so forth. The tight grip of magic was felt for nearly 2000 years before the likes of Copernicus, Newton, Boyle, Dalton, ... left such a mathematically clean impression that even the Church had to admit it could no longer maintain its Ancient views, or at least some of them. Darwinian Evolution, for example, still proves hard to swallow... :)
I'm still no fan of that era though.
http://www.blastr.com/2013-9-2/legendary-sci-fi-author-frederik-pohl-passes-away-93-years-old
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24026153
Epic. Shame the tabloids are more interested in the omnishambles otherwise known as the Kardashians.
I didn't like maths in highschool but loved biology only because the teacher was completely mental and hilarious. As I've aged, I've been more drawn to science - all of it - and now really find it stimulating and fun. I don't think I'll ever do it professionally but I sure love learning sciency things now... and really encourage the kids of my friends to explore it.
Now... back to the beginning of this thread for me. :)
Top news story on the BBC yesterday was Prince William quitting the RAF. This was relegated until just before the story about a cat up a drainpipe.
By Darth Dimi
A boy with an illness which the doctors consider incurable quenches his thirst with water from a well high up in the mountains. Within a mere few weeks the boy miraculously heals. He recalls drinking the water and establishes, in his mind, a connection between the water and his sudden recovery. His story gets published in the newspapers and within days vast troops of people gather around the well, purchasing from the owner of the well expensive bottles containing its water. It is decided that costly medical treatments are ineffective and that the boy’s exceptional story proves the validity of the water’s astounding healing power as a far better cure.
This fictitious story is an example of how pseudoscience works. Similar cases come in huge numbers in real life. Various places on Earth attract from everywhere ridiculously large pilgrimages to supposed sources of divine or other powers; wallets are emptied and the ill are denied correct medical care in favor of some untested therapy from mysticism. The truly upsetting part in all of this is that when – quite naturally – the ill don’t return home in better health, at least physically speaking, many folks maintain absolute faith in the puzzling powers to which they paid a visit. Worse still is that some real scientists actually support these ludicrous claims and devise all sorts of false experiments and incorrect conclusions which, when written in such a way that they sound convincing enough to the scientifically illiterate, are taken by many as evidence of the supernatural workings of the holy water, the mysterious force fields, or whatever we’re talking about.
Let us return to the story of the boy. First and foremost, one sample makes for poor statistics. The fact that the boy heals after drinking the water doesn’t necessarily reveal any true causality between drinking said water and getting cured. If a student gets an F for a paper after having had a certain brand of cereal for breakfast, is there then a proven link between the cereal and his failure at school? If some sudden tragedy affects your life after you’ve spotted a black cat, is there then a proven link between the tragedy and the cat? Of course not, but we all know that in the latter case many people have, for ages, believed so and still, in fact, do! In order to make a strong case for the water, one would need to achieve repeated successes with ill people who find themselves cured after drinking the water. Even then, it might have something to do with the presence of a certain compound in the water, a compound which perhaps pharmacists have known for a long time and have in fact already isolated and distributed via pills.
But the boy was deemed incurable, you say. Medical science, despite its continued advances, still allows for wrong diagnoses. The boy may not have been incurable after all. Such cases are well known. When assessing the disease and the potential for being cured, many variables come into play, some we have yet to discover, some we understand as leading to unpredictable effects on a person’s condition. His healing may have been a natural process. It may also have come from the medicines he’d been administered a long time ago to reduce the effects of his illness. The failure of one diagnose is no proof for the success of the holy water. In fact, it puts the whole element of the boy being incurably ill into a completely different perspective.
Again, in order for the water to be called an effective cure, not merely the boy but many more people would have to enjoy its healing powers. Reproducible results are a basic requirement to have anything taken seriously in science. It’s true that pharmaceuticals sometimes let us down too, but they were manufactured because in the first place they had demonstrated a sufficiently high success rate during their tedious testing phases. No medical cure is sold after exactly one successful result. However, no medical cure is 100 % success guaranteed. That’s something we must at all times accept as a fact. That said, the lower life expectancies and high mortality rates of a few centuries ago have been effectively beaten not by drinking mystery water from some well somewhere, but because science allowed us to spot microorganisms, to increase our hygiene, to produce cures from research that puts to good use the scientific method, … People have been praying to the gods for ages, but it wasn’t until the advent of the microscope and precise chemical practice that we experienced an explosive increase in long-living, healthy persons – for better or worse.
LINK: The periodic table of pseudoscience.
Why do people then believe fake science, better known as pseudoscience? Firstly, pseudoscience tells us things we want to hear. Mysterious cures, supernatural forces, life after death, alien abductions, the faces carved out in the lunar surface, voodoo spells, fortune telling, … this stuff, often subject of our film and comic book fantasies, thrill us, excite us and make us happy. They hold a promise much less cold than what many dusty science books tell us. Science tries so hard to keep our minds sober, its books often labor hard to remind us of all that is impossible. Too bad, but a lot of things we’ve encountered in cartoons as children are said – and demonstrated – by science to be impossible no matter how hard you wish for them. Most scientists believe in alien life but most of them are also convinced that no aliens have arrived on our planet just yet because of the vastness of the universe. Some scientists are religious people but when it comes to life after death, they too will acknowledge how very unlikely it is. Many scientists will tell you that the details of evolution are perhaps not yet established with complete certainty, but that the concept of evolution is an undeniable fact.
Another explanation for the success of pseudoscience – and it’s important to point out that the Western world seems to currently grow only more fascinated by it, which is not a good thing – is that it’s often talked about in such a way that it sounds scientific enough. Please understand that numbers can be plotted out any which way charlatans want and that laymen often struggle with making a distinction between trustworthy conclusions and bad conclusions. It sounds good enough, it must be true!
But why must it be a problem that people cling to pseudoscience? For starters, when parents deny their ill children the proper medical treatment and have it replaced by untested pseudoscientific solutions like holy water, blessings, exposure to weird (and non-existing) force fields, the children may soon die. It would be utterly wrong to have innocent children fall victim to the follies of their superstitious parents. Also, when CEOs of large companies, politicians, army folk and other powerful people cling to the words of fortune tellers before making a call that affects us all, I’m genuinely frightened. Let’s not be naive. This happens all the time, even in our so-called civilized West. Furthermore, the future of our planet and its worst enemy, the human race, depends largely on the decisions we make in this and the next century. I’d rather have sober thinking scientists and people who rely on sober science making the tough calls, than people who believe in astral projections or are convinced that their houses are haunted by demons. Economical prosperity often exists in countries where science and technology are allowed to make proper advances, where they get royally funded and are supported in every possible way. Countries that suffer the tyranny of religious and superstitious madmen can hardly, as history proves, be considered prosperous.
So then how can we resolve this matter and exorcise pseudoscience from our society? As usual, education does the trick. Now, this part is extremely complicated nowadays, since many schools in America and Europe, but elsewhere too, more and more allow pseudoscience to be taught instead of science. Creationism has effectively replaced Evolution in many schools in the so-called Bible Belt, because allowing for that, the local politicians make themselves increasingly more popular amongst their voters. Wherever scientists want to spread the word of reason and math, many uneducated or ill-informed people bible up to go fifty rounds against science. Can I blame them? Actually, no, I can’t. Because people who were never properly educated in the field of science must think us, scientists, madmen talking gibberish. And it’s true, as I myself won’t deny, that science often offers counterintuitive ideas. To a farmer working his fields, the Earth looks pretty flat. To someone who was never challenged to think in terms of particles, a tiny sphere known as an atom sounds ridiculous enough. With monkeys being the object of many jokes, how can Man have descended from the same forefathers from which apes descended? How, in fact, can I convince anyone of the unproven validity of a statement that was never properly taken through the steps of the scientific method, when that someone was never properly educated in the scientific method in the first place? How can I convince someone of the plausibility of the big bang theory via particle physics, when that someone never even heard of protons or electrons, let alone of quarks and the four fundamental forces? It takes many years of hard labor at school before one assembles even a few basic concepts of science. It takes an expanded mastery over math in order to understand the language in which science is written. Ultimately, it’s much simpler to just believe every word that comes out of the mouth of the local priest. He, at least, speaks a language most people understand. Unfortunately, many people still believe the Earth is flat and that God created the Universe from nothingness in roughly 6 days some 6000 years ago. But who can blame them, when such is the only thing they were ever taught in school?
Luckily, many brilliant scientists have already written books in which relatively difficult scientific concepts are explained fairly easily and with respect to the scientific method. If anyone wants to read such a book, I suggest you turn to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos or The Demon-Haunted World. Isaac Asimov’s plethora of science books will equally do the trick. And many books on astronomy, chemistry and physics offer easy to understand introductions on the subject of pure science versus pseudoscience. Find them in the library if you don’t want to read the entire book.
LINK: Interesting comparison between science and pseudoscience.
Lastly, isn’t a purely scientific mind also a much less happy mind? Doesn’t the romance of the universe escape us when we sourly deny the curing powers of the water our boy drank in the first paragraph of this text? I promise, it isn’t. Quite on the contrary in fact. Pseudoscience lays false claims over how certain things supposedly are. It doesn’t, however, explain them. Science promises the closest thing to the truth we have, and furthermore, it shall never deny us the satisfaction of an explanation. As such, the more one grasps the workings of the universe, the more beautiful and awesome the universe becomes. In fact, science offers me more hope for the future than any future teller ever could! Therefore I must beg you, please, to be at all times critical of what people say and claim, to always reason things out for yourself but in an intellectually honest way and to sometimes ignore the ‘truth’ you so desperately want to know and open yourself up to the actual, factual and tested truth. Perhaps the truth isn’t always what we want to hear, but it at least will allow us to make the best judgement for our future and that of our offspring.