So, three more innocent people are butchered for the presidentially endorsed right to be offensive. Collateral damage for the highest moral principle I'm sure.
Well, since this latest assailant seems to have it in for Catholics as well as secular blaspemers, maybe going forward Catholics should stop whatever it is they're doing to offend wackjobs like him.
Even if that includes simply "saying mass for the faithful."
Why is he a whack job? This is all 'propagande par le fait' (propaganda of the deed) but above all it is morality of the sacred in action.
It's very interesting whether the theory of General Relativity is true or not, and how completely or partially that is so. However, it has very little bearing on how I - or for that matter everyone else apart from a few research physicists and astronomers - live our day-to-day lives. If Jesus rose from the dead - which I believe he did - and if he calls us to believe in him - which again, I believe he does - that has a direct bearing on my life, and, if those beliefs are true, yours and everyone else's.
Likewise, General Relativity is 100% irrelevant to how you bring up your children. In contrast, if you believe Jesus rose from the dead and calls us to believe in him, then if that means anything to you, you are going to want your children to believe too. Ultimately that is their responsibility but you will want to do whatever you can to encourage them to answer that call rather than refuse it.
I would add that having a faith that convinces you that you have a pat answer to everything and that brooks no questioning, in the way I think @Forthview implies by "THE TRUTH" is more likely to ensure that your children will reject your version of the Christian faith than accept it. It could also inhibit their ability to emerge from the adult end of adolescence with the existential tools an adult needs to live as a fully formed adult.
My experience is different. I find that both have influence. Relativity because it instructs me that how I as human perceive things is actually different than it it is, and further that things are not actually describable in terms that actually make sense. I'm thinking things like light and energy come in specific amounts (quanta; quantum), and photons (light particles) travel always at the speed of light, but that sometimes particles behave like they are strings or snakes, and sometimes are in waves.
What it tells me is that there are wondrous things, and that I don't have ability to describe. Much as I don't have the ability to describe much in the world of faith, our collective memory, and all the religious and philosophical explanations and understandings to which we adhere.
Thus: these complex material, science facts/truths/theories can only increase my state of mind toward my inadequate understanding of faith. I've also progressively become persuaded that my beliefs are probably expressed in ways as human that don't represent the complex wonder of what actually is re religious belief. If I cannot even get my head around light being a particle, wave and string all at once.... which I think means it is actually none of these and all of them at once.
It's very interesting whether the theory of General Relativity is true or not, and how completely or partially that is so. However, it has very little bearing on how I - or for that matter everyone else apart from a few research physicists and astronomers - live our day-to-day lives. If Jesus rose from the dead - which I believe he did - and if he calls us to believe in him - which again, I believe he does - that has a direct bearing on my life, and, if those beliefs are true, yours and everyone else's.
Likewise, General Relativity is 100% irrelevant to how you bring up your children. In contrast, if you believe Jesus rose from the dead and calls us to believe in him, then if that means anything to you, you are going to want your children to believe too. Ultimately that is their responsibility but you will want to do whatever you can to encourage them to answer that call rather than refuse it.
I would add that having a faith that convinces you that you have a pat answer to everything and that brooks no questioning, in the way I think @Forthview implies by "THE TRUTH" is more likely to ensure that your children will reject your version of the Christian faith than accept it. It could also inhibit their ability to emerge from the adult end of adolescence with the existential tools an adult needs to live as a fully formed adult.
Why does it work with all other religion, but not Christianity?
I'm sorry @Martin54, it may well be me who is dense but I can't follow you. If you want me to try to answer your question, you'll have to make it more specific. That means as a minimum, explaining which part of what I wrote, you mean by 'it' and what 'it' is and how 'it' works for 'all other religions'.
I'm not arguing against General Relativity or suggesting it's inconsistent with Christian faith, if that's what you're accusing me of.
It's very interesting whether the theory of General Relativity is true or not, and how completely or partially that is so. However, it has very little bearing on how I - or for that matter everyone else apart from a few research physicists and astronomers - live our day-to-day lives. If Jesus rose from the dead - which I believe he did - and if he calls us to believe in him - which again, I believe he does - that has a direct bearing on my life, and, if those beliefs are true, yours and everyone else's.
Likewise, General Relativity is 100% irrelevant to how you bring up your children. In contrast, if you believe Jesus rose from the dead and calls us to believe in him, then if that means anything to you, you are going to want your children to believe too. Ultimately that is their responsibility but you will want to do whatever you can to encourage them to answer that call rather than refuse it.
I would add that having a faith that convinces you that you have a pat answer to everything and that brooks no questioning, in the way I think @Forthview implies by "THE TRUTH" is more likely to ensure that your children will reject your version of the Christian faith than accept it. It could also inhibit their ability to emerge from the adult end of adolescence with the existential tools an adult needs to live as a fully formed adult.
Why does it work with all other religion, but not Christianity?
I'm sorry @Martin54, it may well be me who is dense but I can't follow you. If you want me to try to answer your question, you'll have to make it more specific. That means as a minimum, explaining which part of what I wrote, you mean by 'it' and what 'it' is and how 'it' works for 'all other religions'.
I'm not arguing against General Relativity or suggesting it's inconsistent with Christian faith, if that's what you're accusing me of.
"I would add that having a faith that convinces you that you have a pat answer to everything and that brooks no questioning, in the way I think @Forthview implies by "THE TRUTH" is more likely to ensure that your children will [not] reject your version of [any other than] the [Reformed] Christian faith [in Europe] than accept it. It could also inhibit their ability to emerge from the adult end of adolescence with the existential tools an adult needs to live as a fully formed adult."
It's very interesting whether the theory of General Relativity is true or not, and how completely or partially that is so. However, it has very little bearing on how I - or for that matter everyone else apart from a few research physicists and astronomers - live our day-to-day lives.
Block your sat nav's antenna and see who well it works. Unplug your telly from the cable or dish. Stop using your mobile phone. Get off the internet. Abandon everything that uses electromagnets.
These are just some of the things that rely on relativistic effects to work.
Religious education in schools can indeed cause division in communities, but so can churches and religious faiths of all sorts, Not only religious outlooks but philosophical out looks can cause division also.
Humans will find division. My point is that making a religious outlook official increases this.
So, three more innocent people are butchered for the presidentially endorsed right to be offensive. Collateral damage for the highest moral principle I'm sure.
Well, since this latest assailant seems to have it in for Catholics as well as secular blaspemers, maybe going forward Catholics should stop whatever it is they're doing to offend wackjobs like him.
Even if that includes simply "saying mass for the faithful."
Why is he a whack job?
Because, as an armed and fit young man in the country which gave him shelter from whatever mishap he recently fled from, he entered a church and attacked and killed three unarmed people, amongst them a 70 year old woman, because he thought God wanted him to.
In previous times in this country, he would have been detained indefinitely in Broadmoor. Who knows, perhaps that is still the policy here if such people are taken alive. He's a whack job like the man who decided murdering unarmed teenage girls in this city, was a whack job. What brave lions they are. How proud their families must be.
So, three more innocent people are butchered for the presidentially endorsed right to be offensive. Collateral damage for the highest moral principle I'm sure.
Well, since this latest assailant seems to have it in for Catholics as well as secular blaspemers, maybe going forward Catholics should stop whatever it is they're doing to offend wackjobs like him.
Even if that includes simply "saying mass for the faithful."
Why is he a whack job?
Because, as an armed and fit young man in the country which gave him shelter from whatever mishap he recently fled from, he entered a church and attacked and killed three unarmed people, amongst them a 70 year old woman, because he thought God wanted him to.
In previous times in this country, he would have been detained indefinitely in Broadmoor. Who knows, perhaps that is still the policy here if such people are taken alive. He's a whack job like the man who decided murdering unarmed teenage girls in this city, was a whack job. What brave lions they are. How proud their families must be.
So what do we call those who murder without context? Oh, like these guys! Yeah. Whack jobs.
What do you call governments that make their dominant culture citizens undefended targets with their foreign and cultural policies?
It's very interesting whether the theory of General Relativity is true or not, and how completely or partially that is so. However, it has very little bearing on how I - or for that matter everyone else apart from a few research physicists and astronomers - live our day-to-day lives.
Block your sat nav's antenna and see who well it works. Unplug your telly from the cable or dish. Stop using your mobile phone. Get off the internet. Abandon everything that uses electromagnets.
These are just some of the things that rely on relativistic effects to work.
The theory of General Relativity offers the best explanation we've found so far of the effects that make these things work, but it remains a theory. Any scientist worth their salt will recognise that. And it takes a minimal amount of reading of the history of science (I strongly recommend Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything) to realise that the history of science is littered with discarded theories that now appear ridiculous to us, because we've found a better theory.
Where things go wrong in ideology-driven education, be it state or private, is where theories get propounded as dogma and transformed into articles of faith, any questioning of which becomes heresy.
The fact that there's no room for the transcendent in secularism doesn't mean there's no need for the transcendent in secularists; it just gets repressed.
It's very interesting whether the theory of General Relativity is true or not, and how completely or partially that is so. However, it has very little bearing on how I - or for that matter everyone else apart from a few research physicists and astronomers - live our day-to-day lives.
Block your sat nav's antenna and see who well it works. Unplug your telly from the cable or dish. Stop using your mobile phone. Get off the internet. Abandon everything that uses electromagnets.
These are just some of the things that rely on relativistic effects to work.
The theory of General Relativity offers the best explanation we've found so far of the effects that make these things work, but it remains a theory. Any scientist worth their salt will recognise that. And it takes a minimal amount of reading of the history of science (I strongly recommend Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything) to realise that the history of science is littered with discarded theories that now appear ridiculous to us, because we've found a better theory.
Where things go wrong in ideology-driven education, be it state or private, is where theories get propounded as dogma and transformed into articles of faith, any questioning of which becomes heresy.
The fact that there's no room for the transcendent in secularism doesn't mean there's no need for the transcendent in secularists; it just gets repressed.
A bad example for a good point. Our scientific frameworks are subject to further rational enquiry, i.e. they're all statistically incomplete, but GR is here to stay. Just like Newtonian mechanics is 100% of the time in snooker (well down to picosecond granularity at least I'd have wrongly thought). The theories of gravity, evolution, QM won't be disproved any time soon.
The evolution of soft science; psychology, education, sociology down to crime and punishment should avail better examples?
Annannuvvafing. Transcendence? Murdering for deliberately transgressing an arbitrary sacred concept in an environment where many others have been murdered for that, and that transgression being endorsed, isn't transcendence in any regard.
The theory of General Relativity offers the best explanation we've found so far of the effects that make these things work, but it remains a theory.
A theory is not a guess. It is an explanation based on observations and repeatable experimentation. As Martin points out General relativity is not going anywhere. It fits what we can observe too well. At most, it will be superseded like it superseded Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics are not so much wrong as they are limited in applicability. Limited as they are, Newtonian physics still got 12 people standing on the moon.
Where things go wrong in ideology-driven education, be it state or private, is where theories get propounded as dogma and transformed into articles of faith, any questioning of which becomes heresy.
The fact that there's no room for the transcendent in secularism doesn't mean there's no need for the transcendent in secularists; it just gets repressed.
Having a secular curriculum does not by default mean a singular ideology, or really any ideology, must be present.
Humans are going to human and therefore do sucky things. But that does not mean every motivation will result in equal suck.
And it is a false dichotomy regardless. A state education doesn't inherently remove all of religion's influence. Just look at the mess that is the US. Founded on the idea of separation of church and state and an atheist has fuck all chance of being president. Hell, they've only had one non-protestant president.
"Theory" as used in science does not mean "hypothesis". Gravity is a theory. Nobody seriously doubts that if I drop a heavy rock it will fall more or less downwards, barring obstacles. It is a fallacy when YECCIES say "evolution is still only a theory" and take it to mean it's not been adequately demonstrated. It's a "schoolboy error", as St. Clive would say.
It's an error that we were wont to make as schoolboys, for certain. I even have vague memories of being told by a teacher of some description that theorems were proven, and theories weren't, and understanding that a theory was a sort of hypothesis that graduated to theorem status with sufficient proof.
But I was 10 at the time, so I think that kind of mistake is understandable. IME it takes quite some effort to break students of writing nonsense like "the experimental error was 50% because that's the difference between our number and the one in the textbook."
"Theory" as used in science does not mean "hypothesis". Gravity is a theory. Nobody seriously doubts that if I drop a heavy rock it will fall more or less downwards, barring obstacles. It is a fallacy when YECCIES say "evolution is still only a theory" and take it to mean it's not been adequately demonstrated. It's a "schoolboy error", as St. Clive would say.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think Gravity is considered a law.
"Theory" as used in science does not mean "hypothesis". Gravity is a theory. Nobody seriously doubts that if I drop a heavy rock it will fall more or less downwards, barring obstacles. It is a fallacy when YECCIES say "evolution is still only a theory" and take it to mean it's not been adequately demonstrated. It's a "schoolboy error", as St. Clive would say.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think Gravity is considered a law.
Actually gravity is several "laws" and other bits all rolled up into one theory. What we call "the law of gravity" is not all there is to the theory of gravity.
Gravity is a good example of how theory can change whilst still retaining part of the truth of the past.
Newton hypothesised that gravity was a force pulling objects down to the earth. In relativity, what we perceive as gravity is just a consequence of the motion through the spacetime.
In both, the same hypothetical apple hits the observer on the head at the same time.
There's a popular misconception that theories get promoted to laws when they're sufficiently proven.
This is not so. The best comparison I know is with Theory of Music. Or the Driving Theory test. The Theory is the overarching body of understanding. It contains lots of elements, which may include laws. A law is small in scope. The law of fifths tells you how key signatures change. The road markings laws tell you you must not park on double yellow lines. The inverse square law tells you how gravitational fields weaken with distance. They form parts of Musical, Driving and Gravitational theories.
Having a secular curriculum does not by default mean a singular ideology, or really any ideology, must be present.
On the contrary, a secular outlook implies the idea that one's religious beliefs are not binding on everybody else, and that unbelievers are people with just as much significance as the faithful.
The fact that we here may all agree with these ideas doesn't mean they're neutral.
Humans are going to human and therefore do sucky things.
I don't disagree. But recognise that as a modern expression of a Christian belief (" all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God").
Which contradicts the view that some people appear to hold, which is that if you're acting in accordance with some authority (the Koran, Marxist theory, modern progressive thought, whatever) then you're guaranteed not to be acting suckily.
Where things go wrong in ideology-driven education, be it state or private, is where theories get propounded as dogma and transformed into articles of faith, any questioning of which becomes heresy.
The crucial point here seems to me to be that it should always be possible to challenge a theory. This is a crucial value in western education .
Gravity is a fact. Apples didn't fall upwards or sidewards before Galileo dropped things off a tower or an apple happened to land on Newton's head. Theory is a deduced explanation as to why. Some theories turn out to be more credible explanations than others. Although it has turned out to be incomplete, Newtonian physics will 'do' for most of the things people need to use it for.
But apples still fall downwards irrespective of what you believe as to why. And deciding you believe something different won't make apples fall upwards.
Gravity is a fact. Apples didn't fall upwards or sidewards before Galileo dropped things off a tower or an apple happened to land on Newton's head. Theory is a deduced explanation as to why. Some theories turn out to be more credible explanations than others. Although it has turned out to be incomplete, Newtonian physics will 'do' for most of the things people need to use it for.
But apples still fall downwards irrespective of what you believe as to why. And deciding you believe something different won't make apples fall upwards.
Gravity is a fact. Apples didn't fall upwards or sidewards before Galileo dropped things off a tower or an apple happened to land on Newton's head. Theory is a deduced explanation as to why. Some theories turn out to be more credible explanations than others. Although it has turned out to be incomplete, Newtonian physics will 'do' for most of the things people need to use it for.
But apples still fall downwards irrespective of what you believe as to why. And deciding you believe something different won't make apples fall upwards.
Quite, although I think you're underplaying the degree to which observations and derived laws are part of the theory.
The laws describe the observations with, especially in physics and chemistry, mathematical precision.
Theories bring laws together to form a conceptual framework to explain the observations.
So, three more innocent people are butchered for the presidentially endorsed right to be offensive. Collateral damage for the highest moral principle I'm sure.
Well, since this latest assailant seems to have it in for Catholics as well as secular blaspemers, maybe going forward Catholics should stop whatever it is they're doing to offend wackjobs like him.
Even if that includes simply "saying mass for the faithful."
Why is he a whack job?
Because, as an armed and fit young man in the country which gave him shelter from whatever mishap he recently fled from, he entered a church and attacked and killed three unarmed people, amongst them a 70 year old woman, because he thought God wanted him to.
In previous times in this country, he would have been detained indefinitely in Broadmoor. Who knows, perhaps that is still the policy here if such people are taken alive. He's a whack job like the man who decided murdering unarmed teenage girls in this city, was a whack job. What brave lions they are. How proud their families must be.
@mark_in_manchester, the falling down the elevator shaft horror of all this is real. I repress it too effectively. If I don't I fall apart. I have howled like a wounded dog at such and worse. And yes there's worse. All done in the name of the sacred, out of sick gibbering fear turned to cold rage. But three sigmas none of it is a manifestation of mental illness commonly implied by the term whack job. It's just extreme normal. Three sigmas mundane, ordinary; normal. There is no point locking such people up in Broadmoor, they are not criminally insane or either criminal or insane. They are righteous. They are morally pure. They murder their compassion first, just as Lenin taught. Only the sane can do this.
I would empty the magazine and reload. And rail against the other self righteous or just inadequate morons who provoked it.
I concede that I don't think he is mentally ill. I used the psychiatric metaphor because it's the closest stand-alone word I could think of to mean "someone whose standards are entirely removed from anything the vast majority would recognize as rational"(*).
I think over the last few decades, all those psychiatric metaphors have morphed into the general meaning of "irrational", rather than mentally ill. I have actually been wanting for a while now to start a thread soliciting other, non-theapeutic based insults for irrational behaviour. (I think "drinking the kool-aid" might fit the bill, but I've heard it argued that it's offensive to the those at Jonestown who died involuntarily.)
I concede that I don't think he is mentally ill. I used the psychiatric metaphor because it's the closest stand-alone word I could think of to mean "someone whose standards are entirely removed from anything the vast majority would recognize as rational"(*).
I think over the last few decades, all those psychiatric metaphors have morphed into the general meaning of "irrational", rather than mentally ill. I have actually been wanting for a while now to start a thread soliciting other, non-theapeutic based insults for irrational behaviour. (I think "drinking the kool-aid" might fit the bill, but I've heard it argued that it's offensive to the those at Jonestown who died involuntarily.)
On that tangent. They had drunk the metaphorical kool-aid* well before drinking the poison or being shot.
The ritual suicide was not thought up at the last moment, though some minds changed at the moment of implementation, but certainly not all. As to whether it should be considered offensive, I don't know. They had discussed and planned for the suicide well before the actual act.
We're a rhetorical species, not a rational one. Logos is just one element. Subservient to pathos and ethos in that order.
Sure. But if someone values feeling over rationality, I'd say he's irrational, wouldn't you? That irrationality(according to you) happens to be the predominant tendency of humankind doesn't mean thst it's non-existent.
Most of the people who died at Jonestown had decided that they'd rather not drink the Kool-Aid and were murdered while trying to run away.
The residents of Jonestown practiced drinking the Kool-aid over and over again until it became an automatic process (or so Jim Jones thought). But when you see the first few people drink the stuff for the last time, see them drop to the ground and writhe in pain, wouldn't you rather run into the jungle and take your chances there?
BTW, take a look at the basic training of any military unit. Don't they want to break down your rational individualism and get you to the point where you submit to group orders without thinking?
Most of the people who died at Jonestown had decided that they'd rather not drink the Kool-Aid and were murdered while trying to run away.
This is not true from the eyewitness accounts I've read. The group were surrounded by guards with guns. Most died by drinking the poison themselves. How many were coerced and how many were perfectly willing is something we will never know. My point was that they* had made the decisions to follow a cult leader well before the deaths and that is what Drinking the kool-aid means, colloquially.
ISTM, its use can be apt. Buying into harmful rhetoric with a vivid example of how badly this can go.
This does not divorce the use from sensitivity problems. Life is not that clean.
Most of the people who died at Jonestown had decided that they'd rather not drink the Kool-Aid and were murdered while trying to run away.
This is not true from the eyewitness accounts I've read. The group were surrounded by guards with guns. Most died by drinking the poison themselves. How many were coerced and how many were perfectly willing is something we will never know. My point was that they* had made the decisions to follow a cult leader well before the deaths and that is what Drinking the kool-aid means, colloquially.
ISTM, its use can be apt. Buying into harmful rhetoric with a vivid example of how badly this can go.
This does not divorce the use from sensitivity problems. Life is not that clean.
*The adults, a large percentage were children
That's not quite right either. Jonestown was a very long way from anywhere where the people could get out once they were there, except by air, basically there was no-where to go once out of the settlement. Guyana means "land of many waters", and this is apt. The country is swampy along the coast, with many rivers winding through marshes , with Dutch-built seawalls in places where the Dutch and then the British had used slave labour to grow sugar cane and rice. If people left Jonestown, they could go to Port Kaituma about 10 km away where the airstrip is (and people were shot before the massacre), but it'd be pretty easy to return them, because Kaituma isn't connected to anything. Many people did want to leave; this was known to the Lutheran and Anglican ministers in Georgetown, who had this from some people who'd successfully left Jonestown. The Lutheran minister was not allowed to return to the country after leaving to visit Tobago after Jonesown; the gov't of Guyana had all sorts of interesting funding coming to it and they did not like criticism. The gov't of Guyana (PM Forbes Burnham) had wanted Jonestown to continue re finances, but then the USA investigation, massacre and everything else that happened. The Guyanese cooperated with USA afterwards; it would have taken only a few thousand American troops to seize the country. Gov't of these small countries basically played everyone off, and protected streams of income.
My parents worked for the Canadian Gov't in Georgetown at the time, and my sister attended the American Embassy school there, a classmate's father was shot just before the massacre.
We're a rhetorical species, not a rational one. Logos is just one element. Subservient to pathos and ethos in that order.
Sure. But if someone values feeling over rationality, I'd say he's irrational, wouldn't you? That irrationality(according to you) happens to be the predominant tendency of humankind doesn't mean thst it's non-existent.
Nope. I'd say they were perfectly normal. Human. It takes superhuman effort, immense privilege, courage to do the rational thing when it's the ethical thing to do but scary as hell or going to hurt somebody - pathos. To choose between Devil's alternatives. And, er, according to me, again, irrationality doesn't enter in to it. There is no rationality that's being ired. And parsing you if I were saying: 'irrationality... happens to be the predominant tendency of humankind does[n't] mean thst it's [non-]existent', is a bit of a truism. Which I wouldn't.
Most of the people who died at Jonestown had decided that they'd rather not drink the Kool-Aid and were murdered while trying to run away.
This is not true from the eyewitness accounts I've read. The group were surrounded by guards with guns. Most died by drinking the poison themselves. How many were coerced and how many were perfectly willing is something we will never know. My point was that they* had made the decisions to follow a cult leader well before the deaths and that is what Drinking the kool-aid means, colloquially.
ISTM, its use can be apt. Buying into harmful rhetoric with a vivid example of how badly this can go.
This does not divorce the use from sensitivity problems. Life is not that clean.
*The adults, a large percentage were children
That's not quite right either. Jonestown was a very long way from anywhere where the people could get out once they were there, except by air, basically there was no-where to go once out of the settlement. Guyana means "land of many waters", and this is apt.
Jones didn't wait until the group was in Guyana to begin his crazy talk. He talked about committing suicide and taking loads of people with him before he left the US. People committed to the crazy before going to Guyana. The reality is not as simple as coercion v free will. However, the adults did not go Guyana completely blind.
But apples still fall downwards irrespective of what you believe as to why. And deciding you believe something different won't make apples fall upwards.
Sorry, but it's not a fact, but a plausible theory from some exceptionally clever minds. For all we know, apples might simply prefer to drop downwards.
If you believe in an all-powerful being who will reward you for all eternity if you do as he says and punish you for all eternity if you don't, then obedience seems perfectly rational.
I don't think rationality has much at all to do with decisions that involve anything as emotionally compelling as blowing yourself up, or hacking the head off a stranger.
My experience (of being a human, not being a Muslim) is that the drivers of massive emotive force are the kind of slippery things that psychotherapy tries to connect with, and which exist regardless of creed.
Amongst these are the sense of inner failure and desperation at the state of things, and oneself, which in a Christian context can lead people to the enormity of the much-derided sinner's prayer.
I'm not saying Christians always manage to hang onto Paul's ideas in Romans 8 (though Muslims, who generally don't think much of Paul, generally don't go there); in my own tradition, some people are driven to extreme acts of coffee morning organisation and the attendance of meetings with no apparent agenda in futile attempts to expiate their inner demons. It's awful to watch, and it probably has as much healing power for the troubled soul of the sufferer, as does cutting a stranger's head off. I suppose at least the rest of society find it easier to live with, and the policing costs are smaller.
If you believe in an all-powerful being who will reward you for all eternity if you do as he says and punish you for all eternity if you don't, then obedience seems perfectly rational.
Oh aye, that follows from the non-rational premiss.
I don't think rationality has much at all to do with decisions that involve anything as emotionally compelling as blowing yourself up, or hacking the head off a stranger.
My experience (of being a human, not being a Muslim) is that the drivers of massive emotive force are the kind of slippery things that psychotherapy tries to connect with, and which exist regardless of creed.
Amongst these are the sense of inner failure and desperation at the state of things, and oneself, which in a Christian context can lead people to the enormity of the much-derided sinner's prayer.
I'm not saying Christians always manage to hang onto Paul's ideas in Romans 8 (though Muslims, who generally don't think much of Paul, generally don't go there); in my own tradition, some people are driven to extreme acts of coffee morning organisation and the attendance of meetings with no apparent agenda in futile attempts to expiate their inner demons. It's awful to watch, and it probably has as much healing power for the troubled soul of the sufferer, as does cutting a stranger's head off. I suppose at least the rest of society find it easier to live with, and the policing costs are smaller.
Count yourself lucky to have been enculturated thus. In a culture which provokes murderous responses in the multiply benighted minority one it has opposed for a thousand years. When we went and ate them.
Not even history is a sufficiently emotive driver - though Colin Chapman, who knows more about Christian-Muslim relations than anyone I know, would say that shame at the apparent contemporary weakness of 'Islamic' states is one of the drivers for a proposed solution of 'more and 'purer' Islam'.
But yes - you are saying I am lucky to be enculturated somewhere where I received the idea of Grace; more than just the Idea, as it appears to me, a Christian. In previous eras that kind of idea drove missionary societies. Now we seem at a loss to know what to do with it.
Not even history is a sufficiently emotive driver - though Colin Chapman, who knows more about Christian-Muslim relations than anyone I know, would say that shame at the apparent contemporary weakness of 'Islamic' states is one of the drivers for a proposed solution of 'more and 'purer' Islam'.
But yes - you are saying I am lucky to be enculturated somewhere where I received the idea of Grace; more than just the Idea, as it appears to me, a Christian. In previous eras that kind of idea drove missionary societies. Now we seem at a loss to know what to do with it.
Were the cannabalistic Crusades missionary? Taking communion a bit far, no?
Sorry, but it's not a fact, but a plausible theory from some exceptionally clever minds. For all we know, apples might simply prefer to drop downwards.
It depends what you mean by gravity. Do you mean that things on earth have weight and unsupported things fall, or that that is due to an attraction between any two objects in proportion to the product of their mass? In Aristotelian natural philosophy stones and apples did indeed prefer to drop downwards (to put it crudely). That doesn't mean medieval people didn't know about weight.
Colin Chapman, who knows more about Christian-Muslim relations than anyone I know, would say that shame at the apparent contemporary weakness of 'Islamic' states is one of the drivers for a proposed solution of 'more and 'purer' Islam'.
That rings true, in a sense. If by the values of peace, progress & prosperity the state or states that you identify with are frankly not very good, then abandoning those values in favour of values at which your tribe can excel has a certain human logic to it.
But that brings up the thorny question of identity.
Are there people who are French and Muslim who see no conflict between those two identities ?
Or does Muslim identity necessarily mean identification with Islamic states rather than the culturally-western state in which one lives ?
But yes - you are saying I am lucky to be enculturated somewhere where I received the idea of Grace; more than just the Idea, as it appears to me, a Christian. In previous eras that kind of idea drove missionary societies. Now we seem at a loss to know what to do with it.
We turn it against itself. Reinterpret it as sympathy for the interests of those who hold ideas which conflict with it.
Comments
Why is he a whack job? This is all 'propagande par le fait' (propaganda of the deed) but above all it is morality of the sacred in action.
My experience is different. I find that both have influence. Relativity because it instructs me that how I as human perceive things is actually different than it it is, and further that things are not actually describable in terms that actually make sense. I'm thinking things like light and energy come in specific amounts (quanta; quantum), and photons (light particles) travel always at the speed of light, but that sometimes particles behave like they are strings or snakes, and sometimes are in waves.
What it tells me is that there are wondrous things, and that I don't have ability to describe. Much as I don't have the ability to describe much in the world of faith, our collective memory, and all the religious and philosophical explanations and understandings to which we adhere.
Thus: these complex material, science facts/truths/theories can only increase my state of mind toward my inadequate understanding of faith. I've also progressively become persuaded that my beliefs are probably expressed in ways as human that don't represent the complex wonder of what actually is re religious belief. If I cannot even get my head around light being a particle, wave and string all at once.... which I think means it is actually none of these and all of them at once.
I'm sorry @Martin54, it may well be me who is dense but I can't follow you. If you want me to try to answer your question, you'll have to make it more specific. That means as a minimum, explaining which part of what I wrote, you mean by 'it' and what 'it' is and how 'it' works for 'all other religions'.
I'm not arguing against General Relativity or suggesting it's inconsistent with Christian faith, if that's what you're accusing me of.
"I would add that having a faith that convinces you that you have a pat answer to everything and that brooks no questioning, in the way I think @Forthview implies by "THE TRUTH" is more likely to ensure that your children will [not] reject your version of [any other than] the [Reformed] Christian faith [in Europe] than accept it. It could also inhibit their ability to emerge from the adult end of adolescence with the existential tools an adult needs to live as a fully formed adult."
These are just some of the things that rely on relativistic effects to work.
Because, as an armed and fit young man in the country which gave him shelter from whatever mishap he recently fled from, he entered a church and attacked and killed three unarmed people, amongst them a 70 year old woman, because he thought God wanted him to.
In previous times in this country, he would have been detained indefinitely in Broadmoor. Who knows, perhaps that is still the policy here if such people are taken alive. He's a whack job like the man who decided murdering unarmed teenage girls in this city, was a whack job. What brave lions they are. How proud their families must be.
So what do we call those who murder without context? Oh, like these guys! Yeah. Whack jobs.
What do you call governments that make their dominant culture citizens undefended targets with their foreign and cultural policies?
The theory of General Relativity offers the best explanation we've found so far of the effects that make these things work, but it remains a theory. Any scientist worth their salt will recognise that. And it takes a minimal amount of reading of the history of science (I strongly recommend Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything) to realise that the history of science is littered with discarded theories that now appear ridiculous to us, because we've found a better theory.
Where things go wrong in ideology-driven education, be it state or private, is where theories get propounded as dogma and transformed into articles of faith, any questioning of which becomes heresy.
The fact that there's no room for the transcendent in secularism doesn't mean there's no need for the transcendent in secularists; it just gets repressed.
A bad example for a good point. Our scientific frameworks are subject to further rational enquiry, i.e. they're all statistically incomplete, but GR is here to stay. Just like Newtonian mechanics is 100% of the time in snooker (well down to picosecond granularity at least I'd have wrongly thought). The theories of gravity, evolution, QM won't be disproved any time soon.
The evolution of soft science; psychology, education, sociology down to crime and punishment should avail better examples?
Annannuvvafing. Transcendence? Murdering for deliberately transgressing an arbitrary sacred concept in an environment where many others have been murdered for that, and that transgression being endorsed, isn't transcendence in any regard.
Having a secular curriculum does not by default mean a singular ideology, or really any ideology, must be present.
Humans are going to human and therefore do sucky things. But that does not mean every motivation will result in equal suck.
And it is a false dichotomy regardless. A state education doesn't inherently remove all of religion's influence. Just look at the mess that is the US. Founded on the idea of separation of church and state and an atheist has fuck all chance of being president. Hell, they've only had one non-protestant president.
It's an error that we were wont to make as schoolboys, for certain. I even have vague memories of being told by a teacher of some description that theorems were proven, and theories weren't, and understanding that a theory was a sort of hypothesis that graduated to theorem status with sufficient proof.
But I was 10 at the time, so I think that kind of mistake is understandable. IME it takes quite some effort to break students of writing nonsense like "the experimental error was 50% because that's the difference between our number and the one in the textbook."
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think Gravity is considered a law.
Actually gravity is several "laws" and other bits all rolled up into one theory. What we call "the law of gravity" is not all there is to the theory of gravity.
Newton hypothesised that gravity was a force pulling objects down to the earth. In relativity, what we perceive as gravity is just a consequence of the motion through the spacetime.
In both, the same hypothetical apple hits the observer on the head at the same time.
This is not so. The best comparison I know is with Theory of Music. Or the Driving Theory test. The Theory is the overarching body of understanding. It contains lots of elements, which may include laws. A law is small in scope. The law of fifths tells you how key signatures change. The road markings laws tell you you must not park on double yellow lines. The inverse square law tells you how gravitational fields weaken with distance. They form parts of Musical, Driving and Gravitational theories.
The fact that we here may all agree with these ideas doesn't mean they're neutral.
I don't disagree. But recognise that as a modern expression of a Christian belief (" all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God").
Which contradicts the view that some people appear to hold, which is that if you're acting in accordance with some authority (the Koran, Marxist theory, modern progressive thought, whatever) then you're guaranteed not to be acting suckily.
The crucial point here seems to me to be that it should always be possible to challenge a theory. This is a crucial value in western education .
But apples still fall downwards irrespective of what you believe as to why. And deciding you believe something different won't make apples fall upwards.
Sidewards?
Quite, although I think you're underplaying the degree to which observations and derived laws are part of the theory.
The laws describe the observations with, especially in physics and chemistry, mathematical precision.
Theories bring laws together to form a conceptual framework to explain the observations.
@mark_in_manchester, the falling down the elevator shaft horror of all this is real. I repress it too effectively. If I don't I fall apart. I have howled like a wounded dog at such and worse. And yes there's worse. All done in the name of the sacred, out of sick gibbering fear turned to cold rage. But three sigmas none of it is a manifestation of mental illness commonly implied by the term whack job. It's just extreme normal. Three sigmas mundane, ordinary; normal. There is no point locking such people up in Broadmoor, they are not criminally insane or either criminal or insane. They are righteous. They are morally pure. They murder their compassion first, just as Lenin taught. Only the sane can do this.
I would empty the magazine and reload. And rail against the other self righteous or just inadequate morons who provoked it.
I concede that I don't think he is mentally ill. I used the psychiatric metaphor because it's the closest stand-alone word I could think of to mean "someone whose standards are entirely removed from anything the vast majority would recognize as rational"(*).
I think over the last few decades, all those psychiatric metaphors have morphed into the general meaning of "irrational", rather than mentally ill. I have actually been wanting for a while now to start a thread soliciting other, non-theapeutic based insults for irrational behaviour. (I think "drinking the kool-aid" might fit the bill, but I've heard it argued that it's offensive to the those at Jonestown who died involuntarily.)
Irrational isn't appropriate either.
We're a rhetorical species, not a rational one. Logos is just one element. Subservient to pathos and ethos in that order.
The ritual suicide was not thought up at the last moment, though some minds changed at the moment of implementation, but certainly not all. As to whether it should be considered offensive, I don't know. They had discussed and planned for the suicide well before the actual act.
*It was actually a rival brand called Flavor Aid.
Sure. But if someone values feeling over rationality, I'd say he's irrational, wouldn't you? That irrationality(according to you) happens to be the predominant tendency of humankind doesn't mean thst it's non-existent.
The residents of Jonestown practiced drinking the Kool-aid over and over again until it became an automatic process (or so Jim Jones thought). But when you see the first few people drink the stuff for the last time, see them drop to the ground and writhe in pain, wouldn't you rather run into the jungle and take your chances there?
BTW, take a look at the basic training of any military unit. Don't they want to break down your rational individualism and get you to the point where you submit to group orders without thinking?
ISTM, its use can be apt. Buying into harmful rhetoric with a vivid example of how badly this can go.
This does not divorce the use from sensitivity problems. Life is not that clean.
*The adults, a large percentage were children
That's not quite right either. Jonestown was a very long way from anywhere where the people could get out once they were there, except by air, basically there was no-where to go once out of the settlement. Guyana means "land of many waters", and this is apt. The country is swampy along the coast, with many rivers winding through marshes , with Dutch-built seawalls in places where the Dutch and then the British had used slave labour to grow sugar cane and rice. If people left Jonestown, they could go to Port Kaituma about 10 km away where the airstrip is (and people were shot before the massacre), but it'd be pretty easy to return them, because Kaituma isn't connected to anything. Many people did want to leave; this was known to the Lutheran and Anglican ministers in Georgetown, who had this from some people who'd successfully left Jonestown. The Lutheran minister was not allowed to return to the country after leaving to visit Tobago after Jonesown; the gov't of Guyana had all sorts of interesting funding coming to it and they did not like criticism. The gov't of Guyana (PM Forbes Burnham) had wanted Jonestown to continue re finances, but then the USA investigation, massacre and everything else that happened. The Guyanese cooperated with USA afterwards; it would have taken only a few thousand American troops to seize the country. Gov't of these small countries basically played everyone off, and protected streams of income.
My parents worked for the Canadian Gov't in Georgetown at the time, and my sister attended the American Embassy school there, a classmate's father was shot just before the massacre.
Was the classmate's father part of Leo Ryan's team of investigators?
Nope. I'd say they were perfectly normal. Human. It takes superhuman effort, immense privilege, courage to do the rational thing when it's the ethical thing to do but scary as hell or going to hurt somebody - pathos. To choose between Devil's alternatives. And, er, according to me, again, irrationality doesn't enter in to it. There is no rationality that's being ired. And parsing you if I were saying: 'irrationality... happens to be the predominant tendency of humankind does[n't] mean thst it's [non-]existent', is a bit of a truism. Which I wouldn't.
Sorry, but it's not a fact, but a plausible theory from some exceptionally clever minds. For all we know, apples might simply prefer to drop downwards.
If you believe in an all-powerful being who will reward you for all eternity if you do as he says and punish you for all eternity if you don't, then obedience seems perfectly rational.
My experience (of being a human, not being a Muslim) is that the drivers of massive emotive force are the kind of slippery things that psychotherapy tries to connect with, and which exist regardless of creed.
Amongst these are the sense of inner failure and desperation at the state of things, and oneself, which in a Christian context can lead people to the enormity of the much-derided sinner's prayer.
I'm not saying Christians always manage to hang onto Paul's ideas in Romans 8 (though Muslims, who generally don't think much of Paul, generally don't go there); in my own tradition, some people are driven to extreme acts of coffee morning organisation and the attendance of meetings with no apparent agenda in futile attempts to expiate their inner demons. It's awful to watch, and it probably has as much healing power for the troubled soul of the sufferer, as does cutting a stranger's head off. I suppose at least the rest of society find it easier to live with, and the policing costs are smaller.
Oh aye, that follows from the non-rational premiss.
Count yourself lucky to have been enculturated thus. In a culture which provokes murderous responses in the multiply benighted minority one it has opposed for a thousand years. When we went and ate them.
But yes - you are saying I am lucky to be enculturated somewhere where I received the idea of Grace; more than just the Idea, as it appears to me, a Christian. In previous eras that kind of idea drove missionary societies. Now we seem at a loss to know what to do with it.
Were the cannabalistic Crusades missionary? Taking communion a bit far, no?
That rings true, in a sense. If by the values of peace, progress & prosperity the state or states that you identify with are frankly not very good, then abandoning those values in favour of values at which your tribe can excel has a certain human logic to it.
But that brings up the thorny question of identity.
Are there people who are French and Muslim who see no conflict between those two identities ?
Or does Muslim identity necessarily mean identification with Islamic states rather than the culturally-western state in which one lives ?
We turn it against itself. Reinterpret it as sympathy for the interests of those who hold ideas which conflict with it.