Ok, I generally enjoy your posts, and I admit this thread has made me a bit snarky, so I apologize. I am not going to search through threads to talk about your cites being shot down.
If removing an ‘admittedly’ nonsense word from religion is beyond the pale, then what do we do? Why must religion retain the “supernatural” in the definition? I believe in God, I just don’t believe that supernatural is a property of God. I believe in psychic powers, I believe in healing crystals, I believe in genomics, I believe in space shuttles, I believe in the sun, I believe in angels, I just don’t believe that any of them is supernatural.
So where does that leave us in terms of religion. Do you have a definition to offer? Or are you just going to tell me that how I define it is ‘beyond the pale’?
'Fraid so. If a thing is part of nature, then it is natural. So, if magic turns out to be real, then it is not supernatural, but natural. However, the ideas that you mention, such as crystals, I believe, would be agreed by others, to be supernatural. However, since you believe they are quite real, simply unproven by science, to you, they are quite real. This lead to the fact that some labels are subjective. Also, a helpful defintion of god, often seen in hymns, is that he is omnipotent, and able to do anything. This leads to the natural conclusion that he can do unatural things (or if you prefer, supernatural things) such as making a donkey talk, or casing one thing to turn into another, like lead into gold, or a person into sodium. Thus, it is quite hard to say that go isnot supernatural. Some might say that if it is done by god, it is natural, but this kind of arguemnt just goes in circules.
P.S. You like my posts on other threads? Color me shocked.
But you can measure which factor is greater. If race significantly outweighs religion, then your hypothesis is refuted. They certainly don’t have to be equal.
Well, if someone came to an interview with a Bible (assuming it is not for a church position) one might wonder. There was a study in which people sent out the same resume with traditionally black names and traditionally white names. The ones with the white names got significantly greater response. So you’d need to do a control where a white guy walked in with the Bible and a black guy with the suit.
And if people didn’t get jobs because they wore crucifixes, hardly anyone would be working.
Not that I’m arguing that there is no discrimination. Try walking into an interview carrying “Why I Am Not a Christian” by Bertrand Russell and see how you do.
The absent minded professor is a cliche. I can assure you that what you say is not exactly news. Anyone in the computer business can see the difference between a salesman and a techie. You should maybe read Dilbert some time.
Yes IQ tests are not perfect, but some people are more intelligent in some areas than others, and by a lot. Anyhow, colleges don’t use IQ tests. They use SATs, grades, essays, recommendations, accomplishments and interviews.
More true today, but I can assure you that in 1964 and before there was plenty of discrimination just from someone being black. It is not as prevalent now, but it is still there. And I agree with you about race not being real. It is an artifact of the isolation of subpopulations, and will I hope disappear. I have an interesting book on this, and it has a chapter about Hawaii, where things are getting more and more mixed.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find any skeptic on the SDMB who holds the strawman view of what being a skeptic is that you posit here. We’ve all gone through the “lack of evidence is not a disproof” millions of times, and we don’t even use prove improperly, as you just did. I’ve seen you have participated in threads where the difference between science and religion was discussed in depth.
In the OP, you criticize others for failing to establish good relationships with them because they – even if inadvertently and out of a spirit of good intentions – fail to make an effort to understand them.
You call academics “racist” and depict them as condescending toward non-academics.
That first sentence above especially is inflammatory, unsupported, and ridiculous.
As for my standards, I don’t believe in holding everyone to whatever standard they choose to follow in a pick-your-own buffet style. This is the refuge of charlatans.
We all have a responsibility not to make blanket accusations against entire groups of people about whom we’re largely ignorant. To imply, “Well, I never said I would back up my argument with facts,” is absurd.
The rest of your post is irrelevant, I’ve gone over everything you addressed many times. Holding everyone to standards you set for yourself is narcissism.
Nice to meet you Narcissus, I’m Charlotte.
Basically, I am not going to hold people who aren’t professing skepticism to the standards of a skeptic. To do so would be not only narcissistic, but dumb. However if someone is arguing hard skepticism, I am going to point out that they aren’t being very skeptical if they aren’t.
I’ll single out Lissa in this regard, since Voyager and yourself seem to have missed a lot of the thread where the level of rigor she was asking for didn’t apply to her, and I pointed that out.
It wouldn’t refute my hypothesis, it would only inform upon it. I made no bold claim as to what was true other than trying to discuss the impact of religion onto the social factors that makeup what we call “racism”, specifically in how it alienates certain people from Academia, that’s all. Saying “Black skin is 45% of the discrimination and being Baptist is 25% of the discrimination” doesn’t eliminate the fact that the religion is part of the basis for the bias.
I more or less agree with the above.
I do once in a while. I’m not saying that what I say is news, I’m only talking about the biases people have about intelligence. I’ve met a lot of people who thought they were really smart, and were on one level then did something spectacularly stupid. I’ve consistently been told how intelligent I am my whole life on a regular basis, and when I start to get enamoured by it is when I act the stupidest. However, I have no problem sitting there and soaking something up like a child when someone calmly explains something to me they know far more about than I do.
That’s why I talked about standardized testing. One of the main reasons I am against Affirmative Action is that it eliminates community from culture to a certain degree. I don’t have a problem with nepotism, because those with a stronger community support structure are better off in our society. It’s unfortunate that people don’t have that community structure, and I’ve to a large degree fashioned my own around me, so I am pretty opposed to forcing people into a community. But at the same time, my community includes many different ethnicities, so I might not understand as much a community that is less accepting.
Sure, but we’re talking about today not 1964. I think we’ve made some progress since then thanks to the efforts of the people working back then to make some progress.
Sample_the_dog: Just as an addendum, that doesn’t mean I won’t be skeptical about what people tell me, I am highly skeptical. However, how I deal with them is not how I’d deal with a hypocrite professing skepticism but not holding to their own standards. Hypocrisy offends me, being wrong is ok. Oh yeah, and since people seem to forget that I am a human being, a disclaimer for you: I am not saying I am never guilty of hypocrisy.
So you dispute that crystalline structures resonate ambient energy at unique frequencies?
I’m just curious, because I wouldn’t consider that effect to be supernatural, in the way I wouldn’t consider a massage chair that vibrates my back and heals my aching muscles to be supernatural.
Fraid so. I mght be completly in the wrong about this, since I have never read anything on the subject, but until I find a paper on the subject, I am free to despute it. I might be totally wrong, but I still despute it. Now, weather or not that has anything to do with healing is another thing.
Oh, by the way, note the fact I said “until I find a paper on the subject”, not “Please cite this idea.” I believe your time would be better served rereading this thread, to see why people such as myself are so frustrated with your posts rather then looking up cites of crytal healing power.
Oh, really? I guess it’s ok for Ted Bundy to murder anyone he can fool, then, as long as he’s willing to live with the risk of being killed by anyone who can fool him.
Of course, that’s extreme (I can hear you shaking your head now), but that’s where your kind of thinking leads if you follow it.
There are some standards we all need to follow, and not making unsupported blanket accusations against entire groups of people you know very little about is one of them. And asking that we all do at least that much is in no way “Narcissistic”.
In fact, your relativistic approach, which allows anyone to follow whatever rules they care to apply to themselves, is the more Narcissistic of the two approaches.
Allow me to quote you, yet again.
So yes, you did say that academics are racist.
Deny it all you like, but it’s right there in the OP. You explicitly said that white academics are the biggest racists around today and that they think minorities are stupid.
You can piss in my ear, but don’t try to tell me it’s raining, ok?
But it might show religion was a minor effect - or no effect at all to a 95% level of confidence. We won’t know until the experiment is done, right?
Do you know how many seminars there are in universities? In the old Bell Labs. People who consider themselves intelligent are always sucking up knowledge. Who do you think patronizes the library more often - college grads or high school dropouts?
And has already been mentioned, if you think white America is excited about intelligence, you need to get out more. NY papers don’t cover high school sports, but check out a local paper. Who gets the most ink - a debate team or the football team? Who do you think girls are attracted to - the football star or the guy who got 800 on his SATs? Your average American is scared of intelligence. A common sitcom plot is about a kid who (mistakenly) is classified as a genius, and how the parents flip out. Exaggerated, yes, but my work with GATE parents, and even two GATE administrators, shows me that this isn’t that far from reality.
Please explain. Affirmative Action only give the opportunity for someone to go someplace, it does not force them to go there. Anyone, rich, poor, white or black or Asian, who goes away to college goes to a different community. Not to mention joining the army. It is usually good - when my father got drafted in WW II the experience broadened his horizons beyond Brooklyn and lower Manhattan.
I have no clue as to what ambient energy is, but all clocks on computers come from crystals. Whether these crystals have extraordinary powers is something else again. It is a common tactic of so-called mystics to take something from science that they don’t quite understand (and neither does the usual rube) and claim all sorts of powers for it. People do this all the time to quantum mechanics.
Just a note: “mystics” understood the energy holding capacity of crystals centuries before “science” used them. Who is taking what from whom?
Science had its beginning in alchemics. Spiritualists where using many of the so-called “scientific things” long before science existed. I was told psychology used guided imagery as if that was new. it has been used in metaphysics forever. They don’t teach such truths in science classes. There is nothing in this world that is supernatural. Only things science can’t understand, measure or want to learn about.
I know thinking that because you know a lot about a subject means that the average ‘rube’ doesn’t know anything about the same. But any ‘rube’ that knows anything about how a record player works, knows even the slightest bit about harmonics, and that crystal resonates with harmonics. So if you put a crystal next to something that is vibrating, it will also vibrate. So something like a chest, or a stomach, that would vibrate, is thus vibrating the crystal. The theory being that the right crystal will harmonize the energies out of tune, kind of like a tuning fork. If you’ve got the proper crystal you’ll adjust your breathing/movement to the right vibration.
You might dispute whether or not it works, and I’m not gonna argue with you, there isn’t a point, I’m not trying to prove that it does, but to call me a ‘rube’ that doesn’t understand what I’m talking about is going a little too far, because most ‘rubes’ know that crystalline structures conduct energy, and a human being is made of energy, like ALL OTHER MATTER.
You may think that not reasoning things out is ‘ignorant’, I’d agree with you, critical thinking skills are very useful. However, I’d also say; and I think critical thinking is on my side in this one, that dismissing something outright for no apparent reason is ignorant as well. So just because some hippie made themselves look stupid when talking to you about Crystals, doesn’t mean that there is no basis to the idea that is being espoused.
I get so sick of all the people who think they are superior and talk trash about “New Age”, when in reality they LOVE the “New Age” because it’s a catchy buzzphrase for them to use when they want to feel superior.
lekatt: Thanks, but don’t worry, when these ‘rubes’ have it explained to them by one of their P(riest)hDs they’ll be all over it, just like (meta)physics, (al)chemistry and Astro(logy)nomy.
Again, Science is a wonderful tool, but it’s in the hands of rubes just like the crystals.
Sample_the_Dog: If you want to converse with me, please don’t edit my quotes. I’ll put it to you this simply, if I made a blanket statement you take exception to, then your answer is that I don’t think it applies to all academics even if it sounded that way at first. You are harping on the OP, when I spent a lengthy amount of time rephrasing and correcting that OP, if you can’t be bothered to read those corrections, I can’t be bothered to respond to you any longer. Your harping on what everyone else still bothering to read this thread has accepted as my position. I’ll choose my words more carefully next time.
Let me make clear that the “rube” I mentioned is the person convinced crystals or pyramids or other stuff can cure or heal or improve them since some shyster mystic uses fancy terms.
Here is how science works. It doesn’t matter where the idea comes from. I don’t think work on the piezoelectric properties of crystals was motivated by someone thinking they are magic, but even if it did it wouldn’t matter. What you do is to come up with a hypothesis, test it, and try to falsify it.
Do crystals have healing properties, or make you breath better? It doesn’t matter what I think - someone should do an experiment to verify it. If someone claims that a razor gets sharper under a pyramid (remember that?) you take a bunch of razors, put some under pyramids and some not, and randomly distribute them to people to evaluate their sharpness. You also do a double blind study to avoid hints from the investigator.
If you can demonstrate an effect, then we can start figuring out how it works. But no scientist is going to bother until someone does the experiment. If homeopathic remedies could be demonstrated to work, then we could investigate the claims of the homepaths that water remembers somehow. But if homeopathic cures work the same as water, why waste our time. (200 years ago water was better for you than the standard medicine, so no wonder homepathy got a good name!)
And yes, matter is frozen energy. But unfreezing that energy causes a very big boom. E = mc**2 remember? This is exactly what bugs me about New Agers and the like. Scientists use a very specific definition of energy. It is conserved, there are different varieties, it can be measured. New Agers take this term, and without understanding it, distorts it for their own ends. And the rubes, their gullible audience, thinks it sounds scientific and gobbles it up. I heard an ad for some homepathic something this morning on the radio. It made it sound as if this thing were proven effective.
These are the same rubes taken in by the Star Registrys true and meaningless claim that the star they shell out good money to “buy” is recorded in a book in the US Copyright Office. Sounds official. Talking about energy sounds scientific. Unless you present me with some evidence that this stuff means something, I will adopt the provisional conclusion that it is bullshit.
I’m beginning to think that some percentage of the population can’t think critically - after all magical thinking was in control for hundreds of thousands of years. But that is a depressing thought.
Sorry that you are offended by my lack of faith, but show me some evidence, not just content-free words about harmonics and energy. Saying I don’t believe in something that goes against the known laws of physics is not dismissing something out of hand. It is just being rational.
I don’t think you lack faith at all, I think you have a tremendous amount of faith in your own bias. I am not trying to convince you that crystal healing works, only that I believe it works. Crystals vibrate when soundwaves pass through them, it’s that simple. Matter is “frozen” energy but that doesn’t mean it is unmoving, only that it moves extremely slow based upon our perception of time.
My problem with your point of view is that you are dismissing things outright, and I don’t think it has anything to do with critical thinking. Your mind is basically half-closed. You are open enough to be sociable about the subject but you have some things you seem opposed to on principle, which is not thinking critically.
Just because someone doesn’t know how to explain something fully doesn’t mean that they don’t understand what they are talking about. Just because someone isn’t as good at research as you are, doesn’t mean they don’t understand the subject better than you do. Just because someone can’t prove something is true, doesn’t make it not true. By your justification for your own dogma, Newton would have been a charlatan, but I’m sure you make exceptions for him because he’s been canonized, however back in the day he was trying to prove all sorts of wild metaphysical/alchemical/astrological assertions. Comparing Isaac Newton to the Snake Oil dealer is ridiculous, just as comparing someone who is in between the two to either is ridiculous. There are charlatans all over the place, and it’s just too easy to latch onto a catch phrase like “new age” in order to be haughty about your own no less dogmatic bias.
Within pseudo-academic communities, you really only need to sound scientific enough to be accepted by the clique, if you can do that, the rest doesn’t really matter. It’s like that scene in “Good Will Hunting” where he makes fun of the guy at the bar. I don’t think you are an asshole like that guy was, but I think that sort of biased assertion is of the same ilk. If you were a true skeptic you should have no opinion on crystals either way, unless you have some research that shows me it in fact that crystals do not vibrate.
Also if homeopathy is bullshit, that doesn’t mean crystals are and vice versa. I don’t use the example of people practicing pseudo-science as a reasoning why all science is bullshit. I’m not asking you to believe in anything other than skepticism. If you truly believe in skepticism then embrace it, don’t go about it half-assed like most people do.
Also the half-wits that make religion look bad, are the ones without any faith. An easy way to tell if someone actually has faith or not is to see if you can question their religion. Certainly if someone thinks something is true and finds out it’s not, they are gonna be thrown for a loop faithful or not, but if they maintain cognitive dissonance in the face of overwhelming evidence, then they have no faith. Questioning is the friend of the faithful, and the enemy of the unfaithful.
I’m not saying that what I say is news, I’m only talking about the biases people have about intelligence. I’ve met a lot of people who thought they were really smart, and were on one level then did something spectacularly stupid. I’ve consistently been told how intelligent I am my whole life on a regular basis, and when I start to get enamoured by it is when I act the stupidest. However, I have no problem sitting there and soaking something up like a child when someone calmly explains something to me they know far more about than I do.