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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SirRealist who wrote (14320)	12/21/2001 1:03:26 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

And as regards your comment, perhaps suggesting that a majority of male Arabs shares certain traits grants room for the many who do not. Impossible to judge individual traits, nor did I try; I was commenting on communal political behavior. Question: why is it PC to praise cultural diversity but completely un-PC to ever notice that certain people reliably behave in a manner culturally different from us?

To: SirRealist who wrote (14320)	12/21/2001 9:58:44 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

2) Ditto for those (including some Christian ones) that justify their 'honorable, true' wisdom by utilizing scripts written by guys that knew the world was flat and didn't know that properly prepared and cooked pork was perfectly edible? (In the BS era = Before Science). Boy have you been brainwashed!. We have gone over this before. id.ucsb.edu I quote some of the link for you =========================================================== SNIP It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat. A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters--Leukippos and Demokritos for example--by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans. Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A few--at least two and at most five--early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise. ENDSNIP SNIP But now, why did the false accounts of Letronne and Irving become melded and then, as early as the 1860s, begin to be served up in schools and in schoolbooks as the solemn truth? The answer is that the falsehood about the spherical earth became a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad) throughout Western history. This vast web of falsehood was invented and propagated by the influential historian John Draper (1811-1882) and many prestigious followers, such as Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the president of Cornell University, who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts, encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the present day. A lively current version of the lie can be found in Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers, found in any bookshop or library. The reason for promoting both the specific lie about the sphericity of the earth and the general lie that religion and science are in natural and eternal conflict in Western society, is to defend Darwinism. The answer is really only slightly more complicated than that bald statement. The flat-earth lie was ammunition against the creationists. The argument was simple and powerful, if not elegant: "Look how stupid these Christians are. They are always getting in the way of science and progress. These people who deny evolution today are exactly the same sort of people as those idiots who for at least a thousand years denied that the earth was round. How stupid can you get?" But that is not the truth. ENDSNIP =========================================================== Now I have been warned of this "off topic" material before, but before I get blasted off, I leave with a quotation from Paul Feyerabend's, "Against Method" with respect to the Philosophy of Science... (from Chapter 1. The italics are in the original text) snip ...That interests, forces, propaganda, and brainwashing techniques play a much greater role than is commonly believed in the growth of our knowledge and in the growth of science, can also be seen from an analysis of the relation between idea and action. It is often taken for granted that a clear and distinct understanding of new ideas precedes, and should precede, their formulation and their institutional expression (An investigation starts with a problem, says popper). First, we have an idea, or a problem, then we act. i.e. speak, or build, or destroy. Yet this is certainly not the way in which small children develop.... endsnip (I like popper too btw) As for cooked pork!... What about beef and chicken too?? ananova.com

To: SirRealist who wrote (14320)	12/21/2001 10:12:52 AM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

On this subject of how ingrained cultural issues our behavior, I read a fascinating book many years ago The Hidden Dimension - Edward T. Hall amazon.com An examination of various cultural concepts of space and how differences among them affect modern society. Introducing the science of "proxemics," Hall demonstrates how man's use of space can affect personal business relations, cross-cultural exchanges, architecture, city planning, and urban renewal. It's really pretty mindboggling to go live for several years in another culture, words really can't describe it unless you're talking to other people who have done it and have some way of relating to your experiences. I haven't read Hall's other books, and haven't looked thru this one in ages, but while you could criticize some of his ideas, I can't help but think of his description of the difference between the Arab culture's use of space, and that of the West, in light of the Mideast conflict. The book is really well worth having a look through.