Well, no, not if you look at the cultural context of the poem. It was an agricultural society in which the grape harvest figured prominently, wine being one of the mainstays of life. So, to a grape farmer, whose sustenance for the next 12 months will depend on whether his grapevines produce any decent grapes, a cluster of grapes is truly a beautiful thing. Haven’t you ever known a backyard gardener who rhapsodized on and on about how his tomatoes or apples were doing this year? Well, this is a poetic simile from the POV of someone to whom grapes were all-important, and thus beautiful.
And someone’s belly, I forget whose, the guy’s or the girl’s, is compared to “a heap of wheat set about with lilies”. Again, if you’re a farmer, and you’ve just spent the day threshing wheat the old-fashioned way, by hitting it with a flail, that pile of golden wheat looks mighty nice. And the lilies are “just for pretty”.
Hmmm. What is especially crazy about what I wrote? That I used the word fuck, or that I pointed out that the War on Christmas and an antiscience attitude are indicative of the tardcore religious right?
A reasonable definition, to be sure. Out of curiosity, were you to ask those audience members who left to describe what was wrong with Nye’s statement, how many do you suppose would have given this (or a similar) response? I know I need not remind a logician such as yourself that a valid conclusion reached through invalid reasoning cannot serve as evidence for one’s ultimate argument until that reasoning – and its subsequent implications – are corrected.
Granted, there’s no way to know how each of those audience members would have responded, so in that sense, the debate is acadmemic. I hope, however, that I will be forgiven for harboring my own suspicions.
I disagree. I think it is appropriate to be upset when someone treats cavalierly that which you hold dear–even if your holding it dear is retarded.
I also think it can be appropriate for them to treat this thing cavalierly.
In other words, there can be situations in which it is appropriate for A to treat B’s dearly held posession or belief cavalierly, and in which at the same time it is appropriate for B to be upset about this. There need not be anything fundamentally “retarded” in either of these attitudes.
We both agree, of course, that it is sometimes appropriate to treat dearly held beliefs or items cavalierly. So where we disagree is as to whether it can be appropriate to be upset about this treatment, even when one’s holding dear is retarded. How can I justify my claim? For one, simply by creference to the general principle that one ought to defend what one holds dear. Of course, one ought to be careful about what one holds dear, as well, but that is a separate issue.
Thank you for the kind words I don’t deserve, Gadarene. Fun fact: when I was younger, I played the bass canard, but was denied a cholership to Julliard when the instrument proved not to exist.
I missed this before. I didn’t say that stating a fact was taking on an attitude. Rather, I speculated that the were responding to an attitude they percieved (whether rightly or wrongly). And I don’t think that (if indeed they believed they percieved this) they percieved a disrespectful attitude in what he said, but rather, in why (in the context of his presentation) he said it, and in how he said it.
Well, obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of agricultural products.
Since we’re going off on this tangent… I see it’s only the King James Version that specifies “grapes” in the verse in question. Any Hebrew scholars know what the most accurate translation really is?
The willfully ignorant are never happy to be suddenly brought into the light of Truth. There is usually much Screee…! -ing as their false reality disappears in a puff of Roger Corman-esq smoke. I’m sure Galileo was forced to recant due to his ‘percieved’ attitude in arrogantly stating the Earth revolved around the Sun. The flat-earth people undoubtably were slow to catch on because of the arrogance and pissy-attitude of those who dared to insist that the Earth was actually round (well, pear-shaped like Rush Limbo). Highly disgruntled old-school Neanderthals must have jeered the new-fangled use of fire too, and I’m sure they smiled ugly and smug crooked-toothed grins that Romthar the Wonder God would punish those who stuck crunchy seeds into the ground as soon as the snows melted instead of engaging in clan pod-spitting contests as the Romthar of their fathers had intended.
The Politicians get it, so when will Scientists ever learn that the ignorant have to be molly-coddled into believing reality over their fairytales?
Okay, this is stupid. And frankly, Nye was being pretty stupid too. If one intends to attack Genesis for scientific accuracy, an oversimplistic (and that’s all it is) description of the Sun and Moon isn’t a great place to start. Frylock quite reasonably supposed that the audience didn’t like Nye taking pot shots at Genesis for no particular reason. And who would? Frankly, no Jew or Christian is going to appreciate it, even evolutionists/non-literalists. It makes Nye look hostile and arrogant; he’s just pointing and laughing. And in return, a woman walks out. Not, he’s forced to recant. So the better analogy would be if Galileo were to say, “Jupiter has moons so the Bible is stupid” and the Church said “Fine, we won’t pay for your latest lecture series.” He’s not being persecuted.
And we should add as a second point that literary analysis is not within Nye’s expertise, nor is religious studies. One wonders why he felt the need to include such topics within a science lecture. (To be fair, he’s a Cornell grad, so he’s not stupid.)
ETA: Seriously, Count Blutcher, do you really think that anyone in the audience didn’t agree that the moon is a reflector, rather than a source, of light? How are they resisting a “Truth”* that they already believe in?
*(and we’ll ignore the fact that science quite explicitly makes no claims on “Truth”, which arguably is its greatest strength.)
I once knew a California girl who at first did not believe me when I told her a lunar eclipse was the result of the Earth interrupting light from the sun. After challenging her to tell me what DID cause it then, she thought a bit and reluctantly agreed I must be right.
The issue of scriptural literalism reminds me how Maurice Bucaille’s book The Bible, the Qur’an, and Science called attention to this very issue. According to Bucaille’s reading, the original Arabic of Qur’an verse 10:5 uses different words for the light of sun and moon, specifically using the word diya’ ‘shining light’ for the sun, and nur (which simply means ‘light’ in the general sense) for the moon. Thus making a scientifically accurate statement that the sun is radiant, while implying that the moon only reflects.
Johanna
Interesting that the Qur’an makes that subtle yet important distinction.
Had Bill Nye quoted the Qur’an, to the Waco, Texas crowd I’m sure they would have been more amenable to his presentation.
I dunno, I’m skeptical that Nye brought up the quote to “attack Genesis”. Given that he’s a science lecturer, I imagine his main point was that ancient people (and presumably some modern people as well) assume that the moon generates its own light, and that the quote from Genesis was just a good example of this.
That phrase in Shir ha-Shirim 7:8 reads in Hebrew:
קומתך דמתה לתמר ושדיך לאשכלות qomatekh le-tamar ve-shadayikh le-ashkolot
‘your stature is like a date palm tree and your breasts like eshkolot’.
Turning to my Oxford Hebrew Dictionary I find that eshkol means ‘cluster (of grapes), bunch’. But from the context, what seems to be implied are ‘clusters’ or ‘bunches’ of dates.
Since the OHD put “grapes” in parentheses in its translation, perhaps it’s suggesting grapes is the most likely type of fruit in an eshkolah but not necessarily the only one. Translators Ariel and Chana Bloch’s footnote to this verse says: "The eshkol usually refers to a cluster of grapes, but its association with henna blossoms in 1:14 indicates that the term could be used in a broader sense. Here it applies to clusters of dates.
But the verse goes on to say,
ויהיו־נא שדיך כאשכלות הגפן ve-yihyu na shadayikh ke-eshkelot ha-gefen
…‘and may your breasts be like the eshkelot of the vine’…
Here bunches of grapes are unequivocally meant. Strong’s Hebrew Lexicon mentions two types of cluster as meanings for eshkol:
cluster
Actually, we don’t know that Nye was attacking anything. We do not even know, exactly, what Nye said.
I’m not sure how reasonable an assumption that might have been. The overwhelming majority of the 1,700 people in the audience are not reported as having responded in any particular way. The few who got up and “stormed out” are not reported to have shared their thoughts, either, aside from one woman who claimed to have a belief in God. There is no cited quote from Nye, aside from a problematic phrase enclosed in a paraphrase of his remarks.
I would say that the few people who got up and left are twits and that the bloggers who have been re-posting this fact-starved anecdote are twits, but I am not at all sure that we can conclude that Bill Nye was rude, abrasive or any other negative decription and we certainly cannot determine that the (overwhelming majority of the) Waco audience displayed hostility, ignorance, or any other traits.
This appears to be a good case for a Rashomon-like Rorschach test of people who wish to demonize other people regardless of the (lack of) facts.
