---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote :
Re "Richard Dawkins [had] just made a spectacularly crass statement about "stupid" people praying in the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami.": Today I was ruminating on this current earthquake in Nepal. Back in the distant past, to find the earth trembling under your feet and creating such destruction must have seemed obviously the responsibility of a powerful god (or demon). Thanks to the accumulated knowledge we today owe to the painstaking application of the scientific method we now know that these events are a consequence of the Indian subcontinent "crashing" into the Asian land mass (at the rate of 5cm a year!) so we don't need a supernatural explanation. Please let's not feel superior to our ancestors. Their explanation was probably the best hypothesis at the time. Oh I wasn't. That's why I put the Dawkin's missive in quote marks. He has learned a lot from his god delusion debate though, he agrees that religion provides a comforting service that nothing scientific ever could. But this doesn't mean he doesn't want humanity to start dropping old and superstitious ways of doing things and coming up with better ways of running society which is fair enough. It's a dream though, as religions are the first thing most people learn and are as embedded into our being the same that language is, it's a default mode. Dawkins thought that, because a religion is a collection of ideas, a superior set of ideas would supplant it in the same way that a superior explanation about say, wildebeest migration patterns would supplant an inferior one in the minds of biologists. This was never very likely to people who understand religion as it's position as something most people grew up as their first explanation makes it a thing of the heart and not of the head, and so a default mode that is difficult to supplant. You can't reason people out of something they weren't reasoned into. I think it's funny that mankind has enough knowledge of electromagnetism, physics and sophisticated materials to actually build a computer, not to mention the knowledge of logic systems and organised planning needed to get them working, processing information and then passing it round the world, and then it gets used to propagate ancient myths about Gods causing Earthquakes. In that way at least they work very like the human brain. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Thanks again for posting thought-provoking material, Salyavin. While the whiners are busy pointing fingers and blaming others for not posting anything of value, you point out how lame they are by...wait for it...simply posting something of value. I thought it was interesting, especially as real lives depend on a Palestinian state. It popped up on Richard Dawkin's Facebook page last night and I was going to post a back-story but I was busy watching the snooker (no sense of priority me): In 2004 I got a letter printed in the Guardian and it was about Richard Dawkins. He'd just made a spectacularly crass statement about "stupid" people praying in the aftermath of the Boxing day tsunami. Obviously if God was going to help he would have stopped the thing in the first place but an intellectual appraisal of where to direct their energy isn't what people really needed to hear at that moment in time. My letter was about how Dawkins - who held the chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford University - might be better off working towards a scientific understanding of the public. And here it is. May it help him keep his foot out of his mouth. From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2015 10:33 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Faith v Facts JERUSALEM — MOST of us find it mind-boggling that some people seem willing to ignore the facts — on climate change, on vaccines, on health care — if the facts conflict with their sense of what someone like them believes. “But those are the facts,” you want to say. “It seems weird to deny them.” And yet a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures. People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set. Even what they count as evidence is different. And they are motivated differently, based on what they conclude. On what grounds do scholars make such claims? Faith vs. Facts http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/t-m-luhrmann-faith-vs-facts.html?_r=2 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/t-m-luhrmann-faith-vs-facts.html?_r=2 Faith vs. Facts http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/t-m-luhrmann-faith-vs-facts.html?_r=2 People reason differently when they think about God. View on www.nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/t-m-luhrmann-faith-vs-facts.html?_r=2 Preview by Yahoo
