Facing up
17 March 2008 by jimmer“The struggle for religious and intellectual liberty is evidently not over. And in this struggle, the influence of science is surely one of our greatest aids. This is not because of the certainty of scientific knowledge, but precisely because of its uncertainty. Seeing scientists change their minds again and again about matters that are accessible to experiment and mathematical analysis, we are warned against giving the power of criminal jurisdiction to any religous authority that claims to speak with certainty about matters that are beyond human experience.”
From the book “Facing Up” By Steven Weinberg Professor of Physics and Astronomy University of Texas and Nobel Prize in Physics 1979.
You can find more about all of the Nobel Prize winners here:
I began reading the writings of some of the Nobel Laureates recently and have come to find that their consise and clear thinking is so much better for me than any thing else I have read.
What really gets me more and more is how we have been swindled by the media who continue to cover the stupid Huckabees and Drollingers and give them time to advance their own brand of ignorance. Huckabee added his name and political mojo to a bill in Colorado that would give a fertilyzed embryo the same status as being Human. Drollinger is one of many ministers who cater to the state legislatures around the country as reported on this blog previously.
In this the 21st century we have a media that is ignorant of the most basic of scientific standards. They make room for people who can’t reason out that the earth is not 6,000 years old but much older. When all the evidence is against them. As if they have a right to their stupid opinion. But then again it’s just facts and evidence. All of these people have maybe an 8th grade understanding of science and the principals that govern the universe. Who actually think that their belief is sufficient to inform them of what is real and what isn’t. What they lack in discipline to educate themselves they make up for in imagination and conformity to a bad idea whose time has come and is no longer applicable.
We have the ability at our fingertips to expand our own understanding of all things that will make our lives better. We can be informed as to some of the latest scientific progress. Yet unless we seek out this information then we are in many ways like these retarded believers. My hope in humankind has always been in our ability to solve problems. To find new ways and workable solutions to the problems that face us all. Many of those problems come directly from superstitious beliefs and dogmatic reverence in myths. Problems that many of us have found to be part of an acceptance of faulty religious reasoning. Although religious reasoning might be considered an oxymoron.
It will be a great day when all the “Faithful” quit their grovelling on their knees and stand up. When they face up to being adults in the 21st century. And they become informed as to the facts and truth that are readily available to them. St. Paddy’s day is a case in point. as Bob poits out about the reltionship between the Druids and The murderous Xtians. And to whit they (Xtians, Muslims etc.) are still at it.
Stardust, I see Mormons. (snicker snicker)
17 March 2008, on 4:55 pm
I thought you might find this interesting and didn’t know how to send it other than as a comment. Maybe hell is freezing over.
http://www.mcall.com/news/columnists/all-5boscola.6309945mar14,0,750916.column
17 March 2008, on 6:33 pm
Always remember, jimmer, that “science can prove nothing it is just backed up with evidence which is backed up with more evidence!”
I will be forever grateful to our xian commenter Jim Kinnet for that quote; it’s a beautiful thing *sniffs*…
17 March 2008, on 6:57 pm
Good catch Borg.
Eve
I know its all just fact after miserable fact. How can anyone stand it? Also in USA Today in the forum an Atheist gives a good accounting of raising a child without belief.
18 March 2008, on 1:06 am
Excellent Post, Jimmer.
[And thanks also to Borg, for that link!]
Your comment, Jimmer, about the media ’swindlers’ stirs up a particularly ‘perennial’ pet peeve of mine; as I’ve commented on more than once in other GifS Post comments.
Without too much of a re-write, I’d suggest that much of your commentary could be emailed directly to the major media blabbers, like CNN’s Blitzer, Cafferty, or even to more sympathetic commentators like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, etc.
Ummm…Even Faux News dorks, like O’Really et. al.? Personally, I’d probably raise my ‘critical nastiness’ level for that bunch of sleezebags!
Actually, I think we ALL could start doing that on a regular basis…i.e…keep badgering these rather numbnut truth resisters from “all directions”, similar to what Americans United, Freedom From Religion Foundation, etc. do RE certain PARTICULAR issues.
I don’t know about youse guys, but when I sit and listen to all the “missing the mark”, back and forth commentator bullshit about the Obama vs. Clinton Race issue; and, of course the McCain BS….I keep thinking that all that’s REALLY missing is someone like Chris (”The Articulate Bullseye Hitter”) Hitchens to instantly put the revealing spotlight on EXACTLY what the real problem is, that lurks right under their noses…
Delusional, Universally Poisoning…RELIGIONS!
Not ONCE have these friggin’ delusional media outlets ever allowed anything approaching equal panel representation of perhaps the ONLY truly freethinking people on the Planet…the rational and critical thinking emphasizing, more Scientifically oriented…atheists.
SOMEONE like a Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett… whomever!
I can easily imagine a Hitchens watching some of these discussions; steam emerging from his ears…ready to throw a…shoe?…or…
empty Scotch bottle?…at his TV. I know, I often, with complete futility, start yelling ‘colorful’ language at our set.
Am I alone?
Do I hear a Ramen?
[Did I hear a fuck you?]
More to the point…
Perhaps You “Almighty Mods” could make up a handy media email address list which we could all use to individually send our complaints to.
Another suggestion would be to have some nicely formulated letters; pre-setup, of course, for individual ‘customizing’ variations…so as to avoid boring “cookie cutter” sameness. In other words, the basic important ideas which need to be effectively gotten across to these boneheaded ‘Fundie enablers’. You guys know what I mean.
I wouldn’t mind having that kind of material sent from GifS in a sort of composite “Member Email”. After all, we all give our email addresses when we comment.
If necessary, a future Post could be set up for each of us to opt in to that kind of GifS communication; without compromising anyone’s privacy.
Anyway…Just some thoughts.
Yeah…Another St. Patty’s day bites the dust!
One more SLAINTE to everyone!
19 March 2008, on 12:42 am
What really gets me more and more is how we have been swindled by the media who continue to cover the stupid Huckabees and Drollingers and give them time to advance their own brand of ignorance.
Hi jimmer! Great post. It pisses off both me and my husband how the media gives these people attention and serious news coverage and no one asks them any difficult questions. No one puts them on the spot like they do other people they interview.
In this the 21st century we have a media that is ignorant of the most basic of scientific standards. They make room for people who can’t reason out that the earth is not 6,000 years old but much older.
It’s absolutely disgusting. It goes even beyond religious fundies. They are more interested in Britney Spear’s crotch shots, her drug abuse, etc than the really important stuff. They say the media gives the viewers what they want. What sells. Superstition, fantasy, the lives of movies stars and celebrities sell. Reality, intelligence, anything intellectual is considered boring. Have humans really evolved very much since ancient times?
This is a reason I dropped journalism as my major when I was in college. It’s a field full of vermin. I couldn’t sell myself like that. I didn’t want to write stupid crap to appeal to the stupid masses.
19 March 2008, on 4:24 pm
Ramen Chuck.
What makes me most mad and infuriates to no end is how the media assume that scientists should stay with science. That they should not have any ideas or be heard about ideas that are not in their field of expertise. Einstein was not often quoted on anything except his scientific ideas. His entire life however was worthy of our understanding. The same can be said for so many others that the list would fill many pages. This is the way the media has swindled us most acutely. The media gives us the dreck of uninformed undereducated blowhards and expects us to buy into the nonsense. But they never or rarely allow anyone havng a rational or even sesible and objective view to have a say or to promote their view. That would be too hard and it would also be too hard given that the media regard any idea that takes thinking to be verboten.
19 March 2008, on 5:30 pm
Slightly OT, but not wholly unrelated, I hope… Part of the problem with the Media, and mostly the mainstream Television medium in particular, is the fact that they mostly all operate as for-profit businesses. What business is that? Why, selling eyeballs to advertisers, that’s what.
Print media also is set up mainly to generate advertising revenue primarily, above all other considerations.
Serving the public interest, whatever self-serving, lofty rhetoric those in the commercial Media may use to describe themselves and their role notwithstanding, is PURELY a secondary consideration, if it’s considered at all.
Public Television did at least TRY to change this, which is why it has been under continuous assault by conservative financial elites nearly since its inception and why it increasingly depends on massive Corporate underwriting and is thus subject to much the same editorial distortions as in regular commercial media.
The ideological Right have been very effective at conflating terms like “publicly supported” with “government owned” in the public mind, trashing such reasonable FCC media policies as the Fairness Doctrine, ditched by Reagan, which really began the steep downward spiral in the decay of the public discourse.
The problem is especially acute in the Television medium, because in the Television medium, what keeps the viewer’s attention is moving images, preferably lots of them. It doesn’t lend itself very well to lengthy discussions of politics, science, or other weighty topics requiring a modicum of education and intellect to understand and participate in. It CAN be used for that, but really runs against the grain of the medium, and would lead to commercial failure in the media marketplace absent some kind of artificial subsidy.
(*gasp* you mean–Socialism!?)
My favorite Media critic, the late Neil Postman, liked to reflect that of the two dysopian narratives of our time, Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD, it was Huxley’s vision that was far more insidious and operative in the world. Postman died in 2003, and the Orwellian danger has come roaring back, but we find the Huxley/Orwell narratives synergistically combined into a yet darker narrative than either writer imagined on their own.
Libraries and Library collections remain the one public resource where important ideas are assembled and presented to the public for their earnest consideration…the library world–and the larger the world of written, discursive prose it belongs to–is in some ways the last refuge of the project of Enlightenment.
Courageous Bloggers today are not unlike political Pamphleteers of the 18th Century, but Pamphleteers of the 18th century did not have to compete quite so hard for the attention of the reading public. Books and writing really mattered in the 18th & 19th Centuries…the could inspire revolutions and help topple monarchies. The Lincoln-Douglass Debates in the 19th century drew Americans in droves to sit and listen and take them seriously as matters of great import. They were about substantive issues. Robert Green Ingersoll was a gifted orator who drew surprisingly large audiences to his very thoughtful lectures, highly critical of religion….today…eh, not so much.
No doubt we are still in the grips of the writings of dead economists (and live ones, like Milton Freedman) even now. Czeslaw Milosz once commented how people don’t realize how much of their lives are controlled by the scribblings of obscure, dead philosophers.
(Vulgarized) Postmodernism did more to revive near-dead Religious nonsense than any other intellectual phenomena in recent memory…
And George W. Bush is the ultimate PoMo president, thumbing his nose at the “reality-based community”.
Religious hucksterism fits hand in hand with our debased, a-literate, Media-saturated, Entertainment-obsessed, highly distracted, incurious, medicated, anti-intellectual culture, sad to say. They know the “marketing” shtick all too well, the ultimate masters of “Style Over Substance”.
When the material basis of print culture is no longer economically sustainable due to dwindling natural resources availability, the project of Enlightenment will wind down and organized religion, superstition, brutality, greed and violence will be all that remains…it might pick up again after a painful and lengthy period of realignment of population to dramatically reduced available resources, but things will probably get much worse before they ever get better.
Sorry for the disjointed ramblings and my natural inclinations to pessimism.
I sometimes feel like the Reader-outcasts in the film version of Farenheit 451 with Guy Montag…people that actually read and think being viewed as so peculiar and worthy of ostracism by the benighted general populace contented by their wall-to-wall video screens.
Most people pick up on the Orwellian subtext in Farhenheit 451, but it’s really the Huxleyan current which disturbed Ray Bradbury more.
Still, I don’t plan myself to just lie down and take it…I still like the rallying slogan “better to die on your feet than live on your knees”, especially the kneeling in prayer posture.
20 March 2008, on 1:56 am
JJR…Thanks for your thought provoking comment…
Certainly, there’s no need for you to be ’sorry’.
We should all ramble with such articulate disjointedness!
20 March 2008, on 1:36 pm
jjr
Thanks man that is good. No need to apologize.