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Global weirding
- Thread starter Yixin
- Start date
Remember nuclear winter when we were kids? This is the new nuclear winter. And actually, the thing that's not getting talked about yet is ocean acidification. That should scare the shit out of everyone.
Time to act, people. Just because there isn't enemy doesn't mean there isn't an issue.
Time to act, people. Just because there isn't enemy doesn't mean there isn't an issue.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
Spring was very hot, dry and advanced in Provence too--until the end of May. We then had a week of rain and two weeks of cooler than normal weather. That slowed down growing considerably. It's creeping back up now, but for the moment the growing season lost some of its global warming spurt.
Ian Fitzsimmons
Ian Fitzsimmons
originally posted by BJ:
Remember nuclear winter when we were kids? This is the new nuclear winter. And actually, the thing that's not getting talked about yet is ocean acidification. That should scare the shit out of everyone.
Time to act, people. Just because there isn't enemy doesn't mean there isn't an issue.
Acidification's getting some play. It's surprising how little credence science gets in the U.S. in general, though - doesn't more than half the population still dispute evolution?
In my state, of course, the Attorney General is determined to put an East Anglia move on the guy who proclaimed the hockey stick curve of atmospheric carbon concentration.
The thing to remember is, Scopes lost. He was convicted. Evolution disappeared from classrooms and textbooks for a couple of generations in many places.originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
It's surprising how little credence science gets in the U.S. in general, though - doesn't more than half the population still dispute evolution?
In a lot of places, it hasn't really come back.
And the fundis are correct. Darwin is a real challenge to their particular cosmology and theology. They can't both be right, IMO. So they are right to fight it, you might say.
U
Unknown
Guest
originally posted by SFJoe:
And the fundis are correct. Darwin is a real challenge to their particular cosmology and theology. They can't both be right, IMO. So they are right to fight it, you might say.
wise words.
fb.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
Although Scopes lost, no court challenge to teaching evolution or the requirement to teach an alternative to evolution has won a significant court case since the late 1960s. I expect Intelligent Design, which lost at the state level in Pennsylvania won't even go on to a Supreme Court challenge. They have pointedly decided not to challenge curricula in court.
When I teach a course on Darwin with a colleague in biology, we always ask if they were taught evolution and Natural Selection in high school and the answer is always yes from 100% of the students. A private University with a mostly liberal student body is obviously a biased sample pool, but I expect that evolution is widely taught or conservatives wouldn't be so worked up about it.
SF Joe is, of course, right. If one holds that the first 10 or so books of Genesis are an empirically accurate historical account of the earth's origin, then one has a basis for complaining that one's children are being taught that one's beliefs are false as a matter of required public curriculum. But, to be consistent, they should also protest courses in physics, geology, human anthropology, and, for that matter, basic textual interpretation, which would teach one to distinguish between allegorical and narrative texts.
When I teach a course on Darwin with a colleague in biology, we always ask if they were taught evolution and Natural Selection in high school and the answer is always yes from 100% of the students. A private University with a mostly liberal student body is obviously a biased sample pool, but I expect that evolution is widely taught or conservatives wouldn't be so worked up about it.
SF Joe is, of course, right. If one holds that the first 10 or so books of Genesis are an empirically accurate historical account of the earth's origin, then one has a basis for complaining that one's children are being taught that one's beliefs are false as a matter of required public curriculum. But, to be consistent, they should also protest courses in physics, geology, human anthropology, and, for that matter, basic textual interpretation, which would teach one to distinguish between allegorical and narrative texts.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Let us also remember that the TN State Supreme Court set the conviction aside, on a technicality, and no retrial was pursued.originally posted by SFJoe:
The thing to remember is, Scopes lost. He was convicted.
And, of course, let us also remember that W. J. Bryan made a fool of himself and his cause by allowing Darrow to ask him where Cain's wife came from, etc., on the stand.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
The Scopes verdict wasn't set aside, just the fine. Scopes was guilty, intentionally as it was an ACLU test case, of breaking the law. The law remained on the books and evolution wasn't taught in US public schools for the next 40 years or so.
And, alas, Inherit the Wind to the contrary notwithstanding, although Bryan didn't come of wonderfully well in the cross-examination, it doesn't read as badly as Frederic March played it, not least because the real Bryan didn't contest the geological age of the earth and didn't mind saying about speculating outside the text that he only asserted that what Genesis says was true without claiming to know the answers to any issues related to what it said about which it was silent.
And, alas, Inherit the Wind to the contrary notwithstanding, although Bryan didn't come of wonderfully well in the cross-examination, it doesn't read as badly as Frederic March played it, not least because the real Bryan didn't contest the geological age of the earth and didn't mind saying about speculating outside the text that he only asserted that what Genesis says was true without claiming to know the answers to any issues related to what it said about which it was silent.
U
Unknown
Guest
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
But, to be consistent, they should also protest courses in physics, geology, human anthropology, and, for that matter, basic textual interpretation, which would teach one to distinguish between allegorical and narrative texts.
it's a nice idea. but given what the fuckwit disciples of retard analytic-philosophy (in ze beggink, zer voss ze verdt) and mystical linguistics have done to the public understanding of human communication in the past 50 or so years (and, for that matter, how deeply said bullshit has penetrated into what passes for consciousness in the humanities) i can only shudder to think how any informed reflection on the various "truths" trotted out in same could do anything other than send the god-botherers into a frenzy of self-congratulatory masturbation.
after all, it's in the difference between the more probable things we can establish and the wait-what-do-you-mean-the-shit-that-seemed-to-make-so-much-sense-for-a-second-or-so-there-is-just-a-pack-of-cynical-crap-that-paid-for-noam-chomsky's-summer-home-on-cape-cod that fundis find their food.
fb. (raising a glass to the ghost of claude shannon, even as he types.)
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
originally posted by fatboy:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
But, to be consistent, they should also protest courses in physics, geology, human anthropology, and, for that matter, basic textual interpretation, which would teach one to distinguish between allegorical and narrative texts.
it's a nice idea. but given what the fuckwit disciples of retard analytic-philosophy (in ze beggink, zer voss ze verdt) and mystical linguistics have done to the public understanding of human communication in the past 50 or so years (and, for that matter, how deeply said bullshit has penetrated into what passes for consciousness in the humanities) i can only shudder to think how any informed reflection on the various "truths" trotted out in same could do anything other than send the god-botherers into a frenzy of self-congratulatory masturbation.
after all, it's in the difference between the more probable things we can establish and the wait-what-do-you-mean-the-shit-that-seemed-to-make-so-much-sense-for-a-second-or-so-there-is-just-a-pack-of-cynical-crap-that-paid-for-noam-chomsky's-summer-home-on-cape-cod that fundis find their food.
fb. (raising a glass to the ghost of claude shannon, even as he types.)
I don't think I can actually make this out. It could be that I agree with it.
fb can be unpredictable.
JL, I show a methodological yellow card to your peer-pressured show of hands and etc.
But more importantly, how were they taught it? Was it as deeply integrated into their studies as it is into the practice of the science today? They'd heard of it, sure, but did they come away with any real understanding? I think a lot of kids hear it mentioned, but in a very tentative way. I know people with PhDs in the sciences from fancy universities who don't really get it.
Separately, of course you are right, the fundis do have to take on deep time everywhere, and they should have as much of a beef with Hutton or Hubble as with Darwin.
JL, I show a methodological yellow card to your peer-pressured show of hands and etc.
But more importantly, how were they taught it? Was it as deeply integrated into their studies as it is into the practice of the science today? They'd heard of it, sure, but did they come away with any real understanding? I think a lot of kids hear it mentioned, but in a very tentative way. I know people with PhDs in the sciences from fancy universities who don't really get it.
Separately, of course you are right, the fundis do have to take on deep time everywhere, and they should have as much of a beef with Hutton or Hubble as with Darwin.
Ian Fitzsimmons
Ian Fitzsimmons
How do you define fundamentalist? Is the criterion acceptance of biblical text as literal truth?
My point above was that many Americans don't, in fact, accept scientifically-developed conclusions about the world around us, whether cosmological or climatological. Of course, global warming is a complicated idea, and the scientific consensus around it is fairly recent, compared with evolutionary theory.
My point above was that many Americans don't, in fact, accept scientifically-developed conclusions about the world around us, whether cosmological or climatological. Of course, global warming is a complicated idea, and the scientific consensus around it is fairly recent, compared with evolutionary theory.
Kay Bixler
Kay Bixler
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
originally posted by SFJoe:
fb can be unpredictable.
JL, I show a methodological yellow card to your peer-pressured show of hands and etc.
But more importantly, how were they taught it? Was it as deeply integrated into their studies as it is into the practice of the science today? They'd heard of it, sure, but did they come away with any real understanding? I think a lot of kids hear it mentioned, but in a very tentative way. I know people with PhDs in the sciences from fancy universities who don't really get it.
Separately, of course you are right, the fundis do have to take on deep time everywhere, and they should have as much of a beef with Hutton or Hubble as with Darwin.
I don't get the yellow card sentence.
Alas, the distinction is not commonly taught clearly to undergraduates. You couldn't successfully get out of grad school without knowing it at the level of term definition. The distinction between texts is, as most things in the humanities are, alas, a matter of tact, but no less real for all that and can be focused on. It's also something you already know if you just think about it. I warrant you can tell the difference between reading Henry James and Herman Melville (much less Edmund Spenser) on the kinds of questions to ask about those texts. With that distinction in mind, read the first 11 chapters of Genesis and then turn the page to chapter 12 and it's really not hard to notice the difference in what's going on between texts that tell you why women are afraid of snakes, why we speak different languages, what the basic situation is between that Yahweh fellow and all human beings and the sudden account of something that happened one day to Abram.
It's not that people can't see the distinction. It's that they don't apply their normal modes of making sense of what they read to the Bible. There are, of course, rich historical reasons for that. But it doesn't change the fact.
With regard to evolution, theologians relearning that distinction--and early on most did--saved themselves a lot of grief.
The polling methodology might be improved.originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I don't get the yellow card sentence.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Is that anything like The Merchants Lunch?originally posted by Kay Bixler:
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www.truth-out.org
"Their". Please.originally posted by Da Prof:
It's that they don't apply there normal modes...