> <3 0f 4>
>
> I wrote:
>
> > Just thought of a metaphor:
> > Imagine two aquarium - a religious one and a scientific one. Within each
> > there's a fish. If you try to put the aquariums side by side, then the
> > fish'll go grrrr one at the other, fluttering tails and attacking the
> > glass. Merging the aquariums is naturally inconsiderable.
> > Science and religion are two different sets, two different biospheres.
> > And they don't necessarily have to fight over one's memesphere.
>
> Kenneth wrote:
> ?????
>
> I find these fish not only do not attack each other, I am having to deal
> with hordes of their offspring.
>
> Of course, my religious fish cheerfully attacks many other incompatible
> mutant religious fish.
> ---
> They attack each other only when one of them wrongly assume that their
> territories are congruent. For example scientists who believe they can
> empirically prove there's no god, or churches claiming the sun orbits
> Earth. But in reality science-fish and religion-fish peacefully live in
> two separate memespheres.
Frankly, most people have such an empirically ungrounded description of
who/what/it "God" is that science can prove THAT doesn't exist. The
uniform collapse of the attempts at natural theology [created circa the
15th century] should demonstrate the problems. The pop mythos [carefully
documented on the Virus Homepage] is even easier to deconstruct.
A "God" that can be defined is useless, for my purposes. "Look, I
transcend Him by defining Him! How can he be a worthy God?" Isaiah 44
[the last 2/3rds] is a rather entertaining satire, along this lines.
I'm more interested in empirical descriptions.
> Sometimes science indirectly affect religion, as in the case of
> Gutenberg printer which lead to the appearance of Protestantism.
> In addition, science and religion can thrive in the same mind (Newton
> published more religious articles than scientific ones).
> YET, there are no cases of direct joint achievements involving both of
> them.
> You're speaking of hordes of offsprings, while I can't find a single
> infant.
One can bring the scientific method to bear on the religious domain, on
an individual scale; it's extending the results to the general populace
that collapses BIG-TIME. Of course, many of the effects I have to work
around can be ascribed to extreme subconscious biases. However, the
weird-science psychology that actually gets results doesn't *use*
subconscious biases explicitly.
For instance, it took me a few months to figure out experimentally that
shareware and my computer system [currently a Pentium with the relative
speed of a slug, with enough RAM that I just leave the virtual memory
disabled] do not agree financially. [It seems that constitutes a direct
violation of the anti-theft commandment, and circumstances tend to melt
down if such software is on my system.]
Another instance:
One would think that if I turned in my HW on time, and usually swept
A's in my coursework [last spring, it was a 12-hour graduate-level
courseload and I did such a sweep], that I would have the
intellect/mind/physical endurance/whatever to actually do this.
Unfortunately, the above conclusion is incompatible with my belief
system [let's just say that an effective memetic vaccine/vaccime is
running nonstop, and the emotional reaction is so severe that holding the
previous paragraph in my mind feels bizarre]. Instead, such performance is
grounded in interpretations of James 1:5..8 that look absurd to most
Christians. It's a masochistic way to shift blame: anything that's
garbage is purely myself, anything that's up to par required 'divine
assistance'. [Go ahead and laugh. This is opaque to me as well.] I have
*nothing* against learning what physiology/biochemistry/etc. goes into
this; conscious attention to this won't hurt at all.
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/ Towards the conversion of data into information....
/
/ Kenneth Boyd
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