Judging the violence of others

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written an excellent multidisciplinary work on the meaning of life, entitled The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006). I am presently reading Haidt's book for the second time, paragraph by paragraph.  This is clearly one of the books I would take to a…

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Legacy

I watched a good portion of Bush's last press conference and couldn't help thinking it was an audition for the part of a recovering junkie recently fallen off the wagon.  It wasn't the words so much as the body language and facial expressions that held my attention.  Surreal?  Hasn't the…

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Science versus pseudoscience according to Carl Sagan

Provoked by a persistent fellow who has been haunting this site and who constantly downplays the scope, value and accuracy of science in his comments, some of us have been increasingly trying to express what it is, exactly, that makes science valuable and more "truthful" than pseudoscience. While considering this issue, I decided to reread Carl Sagan's inspired book: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996). Sagan's ideas reminded me of the value of Ann Druyan's suggestion that we eliminate the term "supernatural" from our vocabulary and substitute "sub-natural." I believe that this approach would quite often put things in better perspective. I will quote here, at length, various passages from The Demon-Haunted World bearing on the definition and value of bona fide science. Sagan so often said it so very well: Superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way, distracting [believers in pseudoscience], providing easy answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the experience, making us routine and comfortable practitioners as well as victims of credulity. Yes, the world would be a more interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep waters off Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people could take control of our hands and writers messages. It would be fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone handsets rocket off their cradles just by thinking at them or if our dreams could, more often than can be explained by chance and our knowledge of the world, actually foretell the future. These are all instances of pseudoscience. They purport to use the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are faithless to its nature-often because they are based on insufficient evidence or because they ignore clues that point the other way. They ripple with gullibility. (Page 13) [more . . . ]

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Science and Religion: Differences?

We have all been through one cycle after another of debate with someone who insists that science is a religion. This is a tiresome argument on one level because it is one with all sorts of things that fall under the category of "I know it when I see it." …

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