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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (571717)	6/15/2010 11:07:54 AM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1578032

"Ancient Greece was much more sophisticated regardiong morality" you really need to read a history book and stop with the 'feel good' crap

To: koan who wrote (571717)	6/15/2010 11:27:03 AM
From: one_less	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578032

You’ve provided two entry points for rich discussion: 1) beliefs, 2) limitations. I’ll begin to address beliefs in this post and we'll see where that goes... then, perhaps limitations in another. koan: "Polls show the vast majority of Republicans do not believe in evolution (I can post one or two). The vast majority of liberals do believe in evolution. And the vast majority of scientists believe in evolution and think people who do not belive in volution are uneduated, so there is part of the reason 80% of scientists lean democratic (who are mostly liberal); and more scientists are liberal than are conservative and moderate combined. Darwanism is a belief system. Evolution as described by Darwin is not. Evolution accounts for the adaptation and change in species; it is both observable and replicable. It does much to explain the survival of certain life forms while others move on to extinction. I see no reason to give beliefs in the ‘origin’ of species, based on Darwinian theory more weight as a science than other beliefs in origins. None can be verified according to scientific methods of observation. Evolution science is not the opposite of beliefs, it is in a completely separate zone of knowing that falls within the scientific sphere. Arguing for or against any belief system has little to do with scientific endeavor, but not nothing to do with scientific endeavor. Any scientific endeavor begins by establishing certain assumptions which must be just accepted without hard proof. Time for example is not observable as a physical substance yet we must assume it’s operation is real and base our evidence on the time dimension and apply that to operations in the universe for any scientific study to make sense. So in this sense an assumption is synonymous with 'a belief.' We believe time is a practical dimension of our universe, while we hold the plausibility of time being an illusion in check. If we did not establish such beliefs a priori, we would not be able even to begin.

To: koan who wrote (571717)	6/15/2010 11:50:28 AM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578032

"As Jospth Campbell said: a good reading of the bible will find the morality and ethics people refer is simply not there. It is a book where brothers sell their sisters into prostitution and brothers kill each other, etc." I am not a bible worshipper or a bible scholar but even I can see the flaws in Campbell's statement. The bible contains stories, allegorical tales, historical accounts, cultural eras, literary prose and poetry, as well as statements of principle. Campbell's critique takes none of that into consideration.

To: koan who wrote (571717)	6/15/2010 11:51:55 AM
From: Brumar89	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1578032

Ancient Greece was much more sophisticated regardiong morality and discoverd democracy and they were bascially athiests. Ancient Greeks were sophisticated enough to allow infanticide by exposure and pederasty ie child molestation. They wrote of democracy but rejected it as unworkable. Without constitutional safeguards it might be btw ..... leading to tyranny of the majority, looting of the few on behalf of the many ... As for being atheists, what was Socrates condemned for? The Council of 500 condemned Socrates to death for impiety for not believing in the gods of the city and for introducing new gods. He was offered an alternative to death, paying a fine, but refused it. Socrates fulfilled his sentence by drinking a cup of poison hemlock in front of friends. ancienthistory.about.com As Jospth Campbell said: a good reading of the bible will find the morality and ethics people refer is simply not there. It is a book where brothers sell their sisters into prostitution and brothers kill each other, etc. Yes, the faults of the characters in the Bible are shown, but thats not the same as holding their sins up as examples .... Cain and Joseph's brothers aren't depicted as moral for their crimes.

To: koan who wrote (571717)	6/15/2010 12:26:58 PM
From: one_less	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578032

"I know of no scientific limitations you speak of." ========================================================== Science is a system used for observing and organizing information which can stand up to repeated testing by independent observers. Science is based on theoretical frameworks which are open to falsification as new evidence comes available. Some areas of science are founded less on absolute proofs than others, psychology compared to mathematics for example. Absolute certainty, in fact, is avoided by the system. Rare things and chaotic influences are considered as valid as systematic rules in explaining some circumstances. All things knowable in the temporal universe are knowable by the extent to which they are separated from everything else. Thought, awareness, conscience, experience, philosophy, meditation, social theory, political theory, theology etc are not science. The line of demarcation between that which is science and that which is not is sometimes blurry since, for example, a speculation from philosophy is often a spring board for scientific enquiry. There are many things which are real yet not testable by science ... the unique experience I am having at this moment, which has been influenced by the complexity of every moment of my life leading up to this moment, is not testable. My experience is self evident yet, if you were to say prove it (scientifically), science could not provide proof for the wholeness of my experience. And yet it is far more real to me than all the libraries of science texts in the world.