Religion VS Science: Which is now the more evangelical?

On Nov. 21st, The New York Times published an editorial on science and religion. You can find it at the end of this post. This editorial addresses the current no-holds barred, hitting below the belt attacks on religion by science. Basically, although the words used do differ, the message, arrogance and approach remain the same: Kick the bum out. Basically, what science is saying is that the metaphors used by science are fine (even though they are, well, metaphors), while the metaphors of religion are not (because they are, well, metaphors that people deny are metaphors). I wonder if it is possible to discuss science without using metaphors or symbols? Of course, it is not. Certainly it was not possible for Richard Dawkins, who has been arrogant since he created the (incorrect) metaphor of the selfish gene. Quite a claim to fame, Richard, a metaphor whose metaphorical status was so often denied! A prophet of profit, certainly of academic gain. Genes, of course, are not selfish--they merely code for proteins. Nor is the behavior that genes produce necessarily selfish. However, Dawkins is irrelevant in this debate in a sense. Greater minds than his have pondered this question even though the issue could be simply solved by admitting that both science and religion are based on metaphors. The difference is that one acknowledges the metaphorical status, while the other is based on acceptance of the nonverifiable claim, a claim about the supernatural. This nonskeptical acceptance of a nonverifiable claim is found in the science, not only as the Richard Dawkins example above shows, but I remember so many students, so many faces over the years of teaching in colleges and universities, earnest faces telling me how stupid people are who do not accept Darwin, when their own acceptance of Darwin was based on NOTHING, not an iota of understanding of what the theory was or what it implied. The weak link in the man's inhumanity to man is of course or our nature. Just as we use religion, or witchcraft or whatever to justify our hatred of others, I am sure we could use science for the same end. In fact, if we drop religion and replace it with science, I am sure that will happen.

While I want to address this topic, I think what may be more important is the topic of writing, namely writing science or news, without metaphors, exaggeration.


New York Times
November 21, 2006
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
By GEORGE JOHNSON
Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that "the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief," or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for "progress in spiritual discoveries" to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book "The God Delusion" is a national best-seller.
Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.
Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told....

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.
"She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she's getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once," he lamented. "When she's gone, we may miss her."
Dr. Dawkins wasn't buying it. "I won't miss her at all," he said. "Not a scrap. Not a smidgen."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/science/21belief.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=e615c3cbddc62f22&ex=1164430800&pagewanted=print

The laws and politics of cultural competency

According to the National Center for Cultural Competence,

• Cultural competence requires that organizations:
• have a defined set of values and principles, and
• demonstrate behaviors, attitudes, policies and
• structures that enable them to work effectively
• cross-culturally.

The key words here are "work effectively cross-culturally." In the ideal, this is a grand idea. We ALL could benefit by developing ways of behaving that honor the behaviors, attitudes....of others. A nice two-way street. We honor their culture, they honor ours.

The reality, unfortunately, is not quite so grand.

Culture is a curious thing. It is not, of course, just opera or fine art. It is the way we tend to behave in a particular group. The issue, however, is not quite that simple. We behave one way around our parents, another way around our friends, another way at school, another way in church, another in our clubs, and on and on. We have various groups and our behavior is strongly influenced by the situation and by those who are around us. To make this more complicated, in the US, we like to be autonomous and we hate hierarchies. This means that even though we know what appropriate behavior is in a certain place/event, we purposely violate all the rules to let people know what we think of their "blankety-blank rules." To make it even more complex, we pretend we are members of groups that we know nothing about and we copy people (such as movie stars) we have never seen and probably will never see. We are not always conscious that we are copying. While I could go into a long diatribe here on copying, I will end this paragraph by saying that what we call cultural behavior, as a result of all these factors, is quite complex.

If we take it upon ourselves to try not to offend others, to be polite, then cultural competence is not so much an issue. This may require, however, that we stop contributing to the conversation, as anything we say may and probably will be taken to be offensive. This situation, in turn, is offensive to the person who is trying to be polite, as they are aware that they might as well not exist.

While many things lie inbetween (indifference, lack of awareness), the other extreme is that we don't care if we offend. In so doing, we often offend.

What I have found that cultural competence now means is that one party in an interaction wants and takes all the power. The other parties have none. In other words, cultural competency is replicating the very system it was designed to combat, a system in which only one group had rights. In other words, the first scenario I described is the one that often currently exists.

What I realized long ago is that cultural competency is all about politics and little about behaving in an appropriate way. What it means today is that angry people, who may be rightfully angry, have taken all the power into their hands and anything that you say or do that they don't agree with is ipso facto culturally incompetent. This, in many cases, means the you have tried to tell them the truth or point out some facts that they do not want to hear for some reason, or done something that for some reason they don't understand or appreciate. Cultural competency is not about truth, or competence, it is about power. Power, one would think, would need to be shared and politeness, kindness and patience, would need to go both ways, if relationships are to endure. This is not true of cultural competence, but then it is about power, not about relationships.

I remember once talking to Latinas, in a nameless place, about a nameless meeting that they had conducted that, to me and many others, had been offensive to African American and American Indian women. The Latinas could not see that the fact that they switched back and forth from Spanish to English would not be frustrating for non-Spanish speakers. They could not see that the fact that the only fun events were completely in Spanish could be offensive. They did not notice that the African American and American Indian women got up during the meeting and walked out. To these Latinas, cultural competence meant that things were appropriate for Latinos. They never did understand and at the end of the discussion they called me a racist and culturally imcompetent for trying to point out the problems. Perhaps, I should admit that they apparently did listen a tiny bit, as the next year they did have the American Indian women working in the kitchen to make fry bread (culture, you understand) for the Latinas. The fact that the American Indian women spent the banquet in the kitchen was apparently irrelevant. How much better it might have been to have the Latinas serve a dinner to those they had offended. That event, however, has never happened. To these women, cultural competence was doing what they collectively liked and felt happy and comfortable with. It did not involve other cultures, even though cultural competency implies more than one culture is involved.

While these are sad events that create the tapestry of our lives, the worst part of cultural competence, however, may lie in the fact that the current ideas give people the power to ruin lives playing the race card frivolously, stay filled with rage while refusing to address the serious problems in their communities and in other communities, and refuse to listen to obvious facts, even when those facts may be critically important.

Are we a reasonable species?

Are humans the only species that has the ability to reason? The answer, I guess, is who knows? First, we don't really know what is going on in the heads of individuals in species that do not write or talk. Second, it isn't clear what reason means. So, unless we know what it is, how can we know that we are capable of doing it?

Reason may be related to predicting the future; we are, after all, a species that understands past, present, and future.

This seems to hold true when you google the word reason. You find arguments against sexual rstraint, against ideas of creation (which fundamentally is anti-religion--why argue against non-testable hypotheses?), against the war on drugs... One thing this seems to imply is that IF we allow people to do what makes them happy, if we encourage them to indulge in or savor the sensory, then the country will thrive. We see, thus, many more arguments about sexual freedom. Any ideas of sexual restraint are seen as ridiculous, even though every known society has placed limits on sexual intercourse. Marriage--or limiting the number of the partners can have at one time--is such a rule.

My guess is that at one time, reason was based on precedent--using precedent to understand future outcomes. When our "forefathers" tried to design the structure of the US government, they used history or precedent. Tribal law, if law is the correct term, is about following precedent. It is based on the assumption that things that worked in the past, in preventing disharmony and conflict, would also be good today.

We no longer have any faith in the past, because we feel that, in many cases, it took away our important freedoms. This was because we (thanks to psychology--the "helping" sciences) led us to believe that if we are happy, then the country will be happy. We thought we could do better and reason seened to be the best way to get there.

If we looked over history, one has to ask how often reason got people into hot water, rather than solving, in the long-term, the problem that the reason addessed. If this is true, than reason may be what destroys us all in the long run. It may not be, after all, our salvation.