DrW wrote:honorentheos wrote:Thanks for sharing this, Maksutov. This, on top of all the other challenges teachers face in the public school system, makes it almost miraculous we manage to be mediocre rather than abysmal failures in education compared to other nations.
Last week I was listening to a report about the drought conditions in California and the concern about water rationing and potentially unprecedented measures being required by the end of the year if it doesn't rain. One of the commentators in the report, I believe a member of the state legislature, commented that no one seemed interested in putting the necessary but unpopular water restrictions in place at the water district level before conditions get dramatically worse. Instead, he said, it seems the role of leadership so far has been to hope for rain.
In some ways, I think both the magic thinking involved in creationism's/religion's aversion to scientific explanations for how things work and the preference to hope things will work out for the best rather than take uncomfortable action are symptoms of a deeper problem we face culturally that isn't isolated to religion. At least, religion as we commonly think of it.
Yep. I about LMAO when I heard a local TV reporter, in all seriousness, state that Catholic Church leaders in California had made an urgent request to all citizens to joint them in their major initiative to bring rain, which of course, was to pray.
Sad thing is, rain will eventually come, even if it is too late to save the State from many hundreds of millions in fire related costs. But you can bet that, when it does, most of those who prayed will feel as if they were somehow directly responsible.
I heard that, too.
I do think the same spirit has secular manifestations. This quote from the admittedly controversial book,
Bird on Fire, ties it back to Mormonism while pointing to our national secular religion as being root to the Mormon branch:
My interviews with GOP legislators confirmed that, regardless of the care with which Gober (an ASU academic who counseled the Arizona State Legislature on environmental issues) and others chose their words, certainty still ruled at the state capital: If the state had resource challenges, then it was assumed that technological innovations would solve them. This trust in technical fixes was the legacy of the blend of ideology and religious faith that drove the Bureau of Reclamation's water engineering in the first half of the twentieth century. The biblically inspired ingredient came from the Mormons who pioneered irrigation agriculture in the Great Basin desert around Salt Lake, the Little Colorado River basin in Northern Arizona, and in their Phoenix Basin outpost of Mesa. The Mormon blueprint of conquering nature at God's bidding shaped the water culture of the West, the mentality of the Bureau's administrators (many of whom were Mormon), and indeed the disposition of the Arizona Legislature itself, 45 percent of whose representatives were Mormon, though only 6 percent of the state's population were estimated to be LDS members. In other respects, the Bureau was the institutional vehicle of Manifest Destiny doctrine that had spurred westward expansion. Presumptions about the technical superiority of the Anglo-Saxon ways provided the racialist ideology that inspired and steered the romance of Reclamation.It's sad that we can't have reasonable conversations about the role of science in society without it being understood as a competitor with God. In the case of evolution, it's a conflict over the hearts and minds. In the case of water scarcity, it's over effectiveness and wishful thinking. But in either case, it may be history revealing the true story of Isaiah and the Prophets of Baal. What happens if neither sends down fire?
It's this same spirit I see in some believer's claims that to doubt God is to set one's self up as God in his/her place. I understand why it is difficult to accept, but even so it seems far more reasonable to accept we are out here on our own and very capable of serious missteps that could send us into oblivion. Humility should be the real result of recognizing the absence of God, counter to some people's claims someone has to occupy the God position.