by behemot 18 Replies latest jw friends
Any extremisst is someone that views their views as the ONLY correct ones and all others are false.
They will be insulting and degrading of others whos opinions don't match theirs even to a pint of being verbally abusive.
They will ridicule others while denying to themselves that they don't have ALL the answers.
They are closed minded to anything other than what they believe in.
Science is about finding out what is correct & what is not.
What you describe as scientific extremism is exactly what science is at it's core. Science is not about opinions, it is about empirical data. The very nature of science is find out what is correct, what is factual & therefore what is not factual.
Science is science, there is only one way to do science, & that is by using the scientific method.
PP,
As someone with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, I agree.
As someone who has seen the uglier side of science I can say this, live and let live.
Behind critical studies of religion (which were mostly led by scholars with a religious commitment then, and are still mostly led by scholars with a religious background now) there may sometimes be more than the purely "ascetic ideal" of science (as Nietzsche puts it, observing that even this ideal itself is basically religious). There is also, in many cases, a kind of paradoxical religious quest -- to dust off, revive, refresh, renew what old dogma has eventually obscured and buried for preservation sake. Sometimes it's the priests (or prophets) themselves who set the old temple on fire (and the fire of the burning temple is still sacred fire in a sense) in the hope that what old words and notions stood for and thus concealed will "resurrect" and be manifest again, even better, phoenix style. With the obscure faith that there is something indestructible deep beneath the surface they destroy (all the more eagerly). That the truly sacred is not threatened by sacrilege but by routine and indifference.
In the long history of religion it is not a rare occurrence that a new faith rises from the destruction of an older one. What post-exilic Judaism did to old Israelite religion, Buddhism did to Hinduism, Christianity to Judaism, Islam to Eastern Christianity...
Hinduism is anything but 'destroyed'
PP: Neither is Judaism without (outside, out of) Christianity, Christianity without Islam, etc.
What I meant is that each new religion, as far as it is concerned, emerges from a de(con)struction of (a) former one(s) and the reconstruction of its "material" into new structures; and its fresh constructive enthusiasm is unseparable from that destructive zeal against the old; the new sacred fire is fueled by sacrilege; this doesn't mean that the old religion ceases to exist (think "old" and "new" wineskins in the Synoptic Gospels).
You'd think the religions would get more rational over time wouldn't you, but the reality seems to be anything but.
Jesus of the Bible would have made a great Buddhist. The assumptions here are that doing good to others is Christian makes Christianity awefully full of itself.
The whole still exists. This is true of many ancient writings. It does show their influence, but not their factual accuracy.
What is the christian ideal and how did scientists try to destroy it?
