Albatrossity2
Posts: 2780
Joined: Mar. 2007
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| Quote (Arden Chatfield @ Aug. 15 2008,13:10) | | Quote (olegt @ Aug. 14 2008,16:31) | The site is back up.
I found a cool article discussing Professor values. The table of contents has 4 items... |
Awwww.... dose pwofessohs wuh so MEAN to Andy!!!!!!!! :( |
Another of their examples is this one | Quote | | A Kansas university professor, Fort Hays State University debate coach William Shanahan, "is under fire after a video showing him mooning a room full of students and faculty during a heated debate found its way onto YouTube." He "is shown on the video in a profane, in-your-face argument with his counterpart from the University of Pittsburgh ...."Kansas Professor in Trouble for Mooning Incident |
Shanahan (like a lot of professors) doesn't fit into their blanket pigeonhole of evil atheistic materialistic islamocommunofascistic professors. He probably would be right at home in Aschlafly's house. He used to write a regular column for the Hays Daily News; here is his contribution from March 2006 (my emphasis). | Quote | “Science is one ideology among many and should be separated from the state just as religion is now separated from the state.” Paul Feyerabend, one of the greatest figures in the history and philosophy of science, penned these words in his 1978 classic, Science in a Free Society.
The practitioners of science have become as sanctimonious as the proselytizers of religion. The most recent clashes over intelligent design in science classrooms reflect a long-held belief that there is some essential difference between science and religion.
Rather, both science and religion are reflections of often deeply felt beliefs that require adherents to take gigantic leaps of faith. This invalidates neither, nor should it allow privileging one over the other.
Scientific faith is no more secure, no more “correct” than religious faith. In fact, if belief and faith characterize religion in this country, then science is a religion, albeit one of the best organized and most influential of our contemporary religions.
Science works because its works are scientific. Science determines, in advance, the terms of its engagement with the world and then extols the results of that engagement, as if something marvelous has taken place. All religions operate in the exact same way.
The scientific clergy loudly proclaim their faith to be the result of scrupulous inquiry and falsifiable methodology that produces facts. Even a casual perusal of other religions’ canonical texts and personal testimonies demonstrate the same faith in their proof, the same proof in their faith.
Friedrich Nietzsche, simply the greatest thinker the West has ever known, described these methods somewhat differently. “If someone hides an object behind a bush, then seeks and finds it there, that seeking and finding is not very laudable . . .”
At the center of the scientific universe still stands the scientist, who invents the machines that measure and prove. Human scientists observe not worlds, but their own inventions. Those observations themselves result from senses and brains and bodies far beyond human invention (yet).
Other religions’ followers also employ their bodies to observe, conclude, and prove their religion’s truths. They experience the world and confirm or derive truths about the world from their experiences, using the same senses, the same brains, and perhaps different tools.
Mormon students with whom I worked in Utah encouraged me to read the last part of the Book of Mormon and to receive a sign from God. Each had done so and all subsequently received proof of their religious faith from God.
Their method could be replicated and was falsifiable, two criteria often proffered in science to test its methods. The students did not want me to believe in their truths on faith, like the scientific clergy. These wonderful students insisted that I test their faith (and I tried).
The history of scientific ideas is a history of revolutions. Each succeeding generation of revolutionary believers praises their answers as the right answers, even if their answer is relativism. Their well-meaning, hard-working predecessors were mistaken. This revolution has finally arrived at some truth.
Somehow still, many high scientific priests and priestesses decry traditional religious faith in favor of their own forms of proof. In response, Feyerabend’s incisive invective, “the prevalence of science is a threat to democracy.” Amen!
“A free society,” he argues, “is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and access to the centers of power.” Not academics, intellectuals, or experts, nor clergy, scientists, and rationalists deserve to decide the standards according to which society’s truths are determined.
Scientific fact, nonetheless, is the benchmark of truth for American democracy. The scales of justice afford more than a metaphorical glimpse into the workings of our judiciary. Lives hanging in the balance, ideally tipped by science, are usually upended in accordance with only one truth. Justice blindfolded herself so she would not have to witness the results.
Ostensibly, Congress also kneels before the scientific altar of truth and fact. Science is given such unbridled access to national policymakers, even Abramoff would blush.
Tellingly, Christianity today vies for ascendancy to truth for all America and our imperial executive redefines each as it deems fit.
A couple words might anticipate obvious, important rejoinders. This column, of course, reverses itself in many ways. For example, traditional religions regularly and similarly deny different scientific religions’ truths. The call for equal access to truth and power is itself biased for freedom truth, and democracy.
That being said, this column also collapses or succeeds according to its own truth bias. My belief in argument, Feyerabend’s faith in freedom, and Nietzsche’s experience in nihilism are expressions of hard-fought truths, but personal expressions no less.
Intelligent design indeed might represent an urgent threat to our democracy’s separation of church and state. Science itself poses an even greater threat to democratic freedom. You do the math. |
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Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind
Has been obligated from the beginning
To create an ordered universe
As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.
- Pattiann Rogers
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