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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (255202)	7/7/2014 2:07:14 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542168

That is not what I had in mind at all. What I had in mind was how dogma trumps education and science around the world; and this dogma is almost always tied to religion which makes it almost impossible to over ride. And the immutable dogma makes it very difficult (almost impossible) for those cultures and countries to evolve fast enough to address the necessary modern problems. You don't see that? What I did have in mind is perfectly described by what we see going on in the Middle east. Total chaos caused by cultures who value religion over education. First answer to this is Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Religious ethics as a generator of civilizational change. To make your argument hold water, you have to retreat to very abstract level of generalities--dogma versus education, for instance. The argument loses it's bite when you do so. But it's more seriously flawed by having to depend on stereotypes to communicate. If you pick a historical/cultural moment, you are much more likely to find messy reality--lots of religious folk acting counter to the stereotype, for instance. In the ME you are looking at specific interpretations of specific religious doctrine. Not dogma in some abstract sense. And I am surprised you don't seem to see the same picture I have painted above. It is a pretty simple concept I would expect a man of your intelligence and education to see as easily as the light of day. Ah, well, you know how it is with us slower, older folk. One of these days I'll learn to be smart. Like you are smart. (That's a tart filled tongue in my mouth, in case it wasn't clear.) PS and I never saw a scientist get upset because of an equation they didn't like. And I am simply presenting an equation. Hardly. You are simply making undocumented assertions at levels of abstraction, to repeat myself, that leaves you the victim of stereotypes.