Reason Rally (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, April 01, 2012, 22:00 (4597 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Tony,-> If you look at the past with a critical eye and think that perhaps those people living 3000+ years ago knew more than modern historians/archaeologist/scientist give them credit for, then the reason rally is not for you. 
> -Here's the rub. The world really is better off now than it was 3000 years ago. I'll get to that. -> If you think that numbers are not sufficient to explain the entirety of existence, then the reason rally is not for you. 
> -There actually were some artists attending the reason rally. They have a different take on that. -> If you realize that something can not come from nothing, then the reason rally is not for you. 
> -But if you realize that God, too, is *something* you also realize that all you've done is shift the existence question from the universe to God. And the reason rally IS for you. -> 
> I don't sit on the fence because I do not admit it's existence. Science, as Xeno repeatedly enjoys pointing out, does not care about truth or proving anything. It insulates itself from moral responsibility. It has become a soap box for narcissistic rabble rousers to tout how much more they think they know than everyone else while looking down their noses and foaming at the mouth when anyone mentions anything that falls outside their narrow minded purview.-There's a few things here, that I don't feel were properly researched, but that makes sense since I hear a strong peal of passion here. (Call me Matt, Tony.) -Science's view on truth, is based on the fact that epistemologically speaking "We don't know what we don't know.) So science starts out of the gate with no assertions about truth. It's central mechanism is purely in "does my model describe what's going on?" It's built with a self-correction mechanism. As such, its an exquisitely powerful tool.-Troublesome is your statement in red. What's the moral value of a rock? How about a qubit, quark, the Sun, or the new planet they just discovered 22 light years from here? -Furthermore, science limits itself in psychology and sociology by ethics boards, whose job is to stop experiments like The Stanford Prison Experiment.-But even for the harm those studies have caused, they certainly give us extremely powerful information about the human mind, do they not? -I will further make the claim that morality now, is far superior to the morality of 3000 years ago. I read a book over the last few months called "The Better Angels of our Nature." It makes no argument over what's caused the nonviolence trend in our species, but it seems to me pretty clear that despite Hitler and Pol Pot, we live in a much more moral age than our ancestors. -Fact: Rape, slavery, and "Total War" were accepted norms in antiquity. (Total war is the concept of complete destruction of every city that you come across. Women were kept as conquest and all men and boys were slaughtered.) The conquest of Canaan bears much resemblance in brutality as the sacking of Troy. Those were all *accepted moral norms* for that period. The Jews even practiced Human sacrifice all the way up until the time they recorded the myth of Abraham and Isaac. The Spartans engaged in infanticide, and yearly massacred their peasant class (helots) in order to keep fear in place. -Lets not forget Rome, where public rape, execution of animals, and the massacre of slaves all for the sake of entertainment was another cultural norm. -Fast-forward to the middle ages, and just Google "medieval torture devices" to see how our ingenuity was applied in causing suffering. -Go ahead. Love our ancestors--I do too. But in many ways, we have irrefutably surpassed them, in love, violence, technology, and yes, reason. -Morality has *nothing* to do with science. Though I would argue that science has certainly made our lives more livable over the last 30 years. -Finally, I'd like you to point me to where you got the statistic about "most" of all scientific papers being retracted after 3 years. Considering how fast paced some fields are (like my own computer science) it doesn't sound like a horrible number.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"