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Author Topic:   The Way Forward is Through Science and Religion
kuresu
Member (Idle past 2513 days)
Posts: 2544
From: boulder, colorado
Joined: 03-24-2006


Message 31 of 43 (347295)
09-07-2006 1:48 PM
Reply to: Message 30 by jar
09-07-2006 12:29 PM


Re: Science and Ethics?
I agree that ethics is highly important to have in science, but the foundation of what science is, is silent on the issue.
So ethics, morality, must come from somewhere else, must be taught by something else.

All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

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jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


Message 32 of 43 (347297)
09-07-2006 1:58 PM
Reply to: Message 31 by kuresu
09-07-2006 1:48 PM


Re: Science and Ethics?
Does a scientist make up data?
Must a scientist include even the data that counters his position?
Does science teach and require a level of personal honesty?
Edited by jar, : No reason given.

Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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JavaMan
Member (Idle past 2319 days)
Posts: 475
From: York, England
Joined: 08-05-2005


Message 33 of 43 (347508)
09-08-2006 7:26 AM
Reply to: Message 26 by GDR
09-07-2006 10:07 AM


Re: Religion is belief in a supernatural world
At heart religion is belief in a supernatural world, and it's that belief that conflicts with science.
Absolutely wrong. Science is agnostic. It is the study of the natural world and has nothing to say about the supernatural.
In mixed company, maybe. But when the Christians leave the room...
In every case where we've been presented with competing supernatural and naturalistic explanations of phenomena, the supernatural explanation has proven to be worthless. Because of this history, the cautious religious now avoid making supernatural claims that might conflict with exiting naturalistic explanations. So in this sense, you're right, there is no conflict, but that's only because you've raised the white flag and retreated to more insubstantial ground.

'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

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GDR
Member
Posts: 6202
From: Sidney, BC, Canada
Joined: 05-22-2005
Member Rating: 1.9


Message 34 of 43 (347539)
09-08-2006 11:30 AM
Reply to: Message 33 by JavaMan
09-08-2006 7:26 AM


Re: Religion is belief in a supernatural world
JavaMan writes:
In every case where we've been presented with competing supernatural and naturalistic explanations of phenomena, the supernatural explanation has proven to be worthless. Because of this history, the cautious religious now avoid making supernatural claims that might conflict with exiting naturalistic explanations. So in this sense, you're right, there is no conflict, but that's only because you've raised the white flag and retreated to more insubstantial ground.
Not at all. I'm a Christian that believes that the Bible should be read as truth but not necessarily literal truth. That isn't a retreat. The idea of literalism is relatively new. Read Lewis and others like him. Reading Genesis to say that God created and gave us the knowledge both good and evil is substantial. To believe in an actual talking snake does not make it any more substantial in content.
To believe that God created means a belief in the supernatural or metaphysical. The same for the Christian belief in Christ as God incarnate or in His resurrection. There is no naturalistic explanations for these things. Science attempts to give us the hows of our creation, not the whys.

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 Message 33 by JavaMan, posted 09-08-2006 7:26 AM JavaMan has replied

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Silent H
Member (Idle past 5820 days)
Posts: 7405
From: satellite of love
Joined: 12-11-2002


Message 35 of 43 (347548)
09-08-2006 12:24 PM
Reply to: Message 32 by jar
09-07-2006 1:58 PM


Re: Science and Ethics?
Your answer didn't feel right, and it took me a day to puzzle it out...
Does a scientist make up data?
Yes, not all, but many have done so. Even Einstein sort of made up some "data" to justify a preconceived notion.
Must a scientist include even the data that counters his position?
No, while this is not always fatal, it is generally unproductive in the longterm as acting against an underlying fact will eventually have consequences people can't ignore. That does not mean a scientist has to do anything in the short term.
Two major science orgs involved with psychology have already stated that this is no longer standard practice for them, if/when maintaining social/political norms are at stake. Indeed I think most of science history has been conflicting data suppressed by a majority of scientists at the time, when it challenges something important to them.
Does science teach and require a level of personal honesty?
No, actually it doesn't. If one is going to be practical about understanding something then handling the data without interfering with one's results is usually the straightest path to success. But one can be as immoral and dishonest as one wants outside of that very practical issue.
Fiascos, including the recent story of dna research in Korea, the way HIV was discovered, and the two APA orgs standing up for norms over scientific methodology, shows that science does not require any scruples whatsoever.

holmes {in temp decloak from lurker mode}
"What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away." (D.Bros)

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sidelined
Member (Idle past 5908 days)
Posts: 3435
From: Edmonton Alberta Canada
Joined: 08-30-2003


Message 36 of 43 (347553)
09-08-2006 12:59 PM
Reply to: Message 32 by jar
09-07-2006 1:58 PM


Re: Science and Ethics?
jar
Does a scientist make up data?
Must a scientist include even the data that counters his position?Does science teach and require a level of personal honesty?
In answer to this I present this speech
Cargo Cult Science
Richard Feynman
From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974.
Also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a
method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This
method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a
scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they
proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of
mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable
experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue
sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking,
"Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"
I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?" "Sure," she says.
They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything
like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?" I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!" They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!" I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the
latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel
room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded;
nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better
under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the
key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have
been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have
some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice,
you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up--in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to
improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method
should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in
decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this
pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other
way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after
disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South
Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to
happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a
man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how theyworked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know
anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must
also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have
put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that
leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest; it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will--including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you
were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary
fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject.
Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That's why the planes don't land--but they don't land.
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the
charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit
off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an
electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's
apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value
they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those
tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we
haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.
After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the
layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or
something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and
astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said,
"Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a
scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing-- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's
their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always
decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We
must publish BOTH kinds of results.
I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me
you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice.
Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology
department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment
has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to
not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happened.
Nowadays, there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an
experiment being done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to
compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen, he had to use data from someone else's experiment on
light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying--possibly--the value of the experiments themselves,
which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all
kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with
doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the
rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had
been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as
before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using-- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.
I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.
Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms--and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiements--they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the para-psychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated--that you can do again and get the same effect--statistically, even. They run a million rats--no, it's people this time--they do a lot of things are get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that is is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?
This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in
telling people what to do next, he says that one of things they have to do is be sure the only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent--not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results.
It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching--to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an
experiment with scientific integrity.
So I have just one wish for you--the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described,
and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your
integrity. May you have that freedom.

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JavaMan
Member (Idle past 2319 days)
Posts: 475
From: York, England
Joined: 08-05-2005


Message 37 of 43 (348099)
09-11-2006 11:28 AM
Reply to: Message 34 by GDR
09-08-2006 11:30 AM


Re: Religion is belief in a supernatural world
To believe that God created means a belief in the supernatural or metaphysical. The same for the Christian belief in Christ as God incarnate or in His resurrection. There is no naturalistic explanations for these things. Science attempts to give us the hows of our creation, not the whys.
These things don't need an explanation, naturalistic or otherwise. They're supernatural beliefs. It's when you use those beliefs to explain phenomena (such as why the sun rises and sets, or why bacteria grow resistant to antibiotics, or where consciousness comes from) that religion comes into conflict with science. You've given up your religious explanation in the first two cases (because science has come up with a fairly complete explanation that you can't compete with), but not in the latter, because the science of consciousness is still in its infancy.
I don't want to deny your religious experience, but some of us think that a humanistic (but not necessarily scientific) approach to ethics and purpose is more fruitful than a religious one. All that vague, unproveable supernatural stuff just gets in the way. So if I were writing the strapline to your opening post, I'd change it to:
The Way Forward is Through Science and Humanism

'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

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Replies to this message:
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nator
Member (Idle past 2170 days)
Posts: 12961
From: Ann Arbor
Joined: 12-09-2001


Message 38 of 43 (348110)
09-11-2006 12:13 PM
Reply to: Message 25 by PaulK
09-07-2006 8:26 AM


quote:
While the Straussians may claim that religion is a "noble lie", necessary for social control it is far from clear that it really contributes as much as some people claim for it.
Zhimbo and I were talking about this the other day and he said that he thought it would be good if everybody had "a little bit of religion" while growing up, as it is an institution, usually, that teaches the golden rule and generally good morals and ethics.

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nator
Member (Idle past 2170 days)
Posts: 12961
From: Ann Arbor
Joined: 12-09-2001


Message 39 of 43 (348111)
09-11-2006 12:16 PM
Reply to: Message 28 by GDR
09-07-2006 11:51 AM


who is in the business of teaching morality
quote:
Parents.
...and thus, the culture at learge teaches morality.

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GDR
Member
Posts: 6202
From: Sidney, BC, Canada
Joined: 05-22-2005
Member Rating: 1.9


Message 40 of 43 (348125)
09-11-2006 1:42 PM
Reply to: Message 37 by JavaMan
09-11-2006 11:28 AM


Re: Religion is belief in a supernatural world
JavaMan writes:
These things don't need an explanation, naturalistic or otherwise. They're supernatural beliefs. It's when you use those beliefs to explain phenomena (such as why the sun rises and sets, or why bacteria grow resistant to antibiotics, or where consciousness comes from) that religion comes into conflict with science. You've given up your religious explanation in the first two cases (because science has come up with a fairly complete explanation that you can't compete with), but not in the latter, because the science of consciousness is still in its infancy.
I'm not suggesting that religion explains the phenomena you mention. What I'm saying is that science can't tell us why the sun, bacteria or consciousness exists at all. I very much enjoy learning the scientific explanations of what I see as God's design. I just see no conflict between the two different fields of study.
JavaMan writes:
I don't want to deny your religious experience, but some of us think that a humanistic (but not necessarily scientific) approach to ethics and purpose is more fruitful than a religious one. All that vague, unproveable supernatural stuff just gets in the way. So if I were writing the strapline to your opening post, I'd change it to:
The Way Forward is Through Science and Humanism
I'm a Christian. I'm not a Christian because I think that it teaches a set of moral tenets. I am a Christian because I believe that the faith represents truth. As far as humanism is concerned though it doesn't supply any answers. It doesn't tell us about either how or why anything exists.
The idea of the OP is to make the point that science and religion, (specifically in my case the Christian religion) are not in conflict. In my view they are complimentary.

Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

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GDR
Member
Posts: 6202
From: Sidney, BC, Canada
Joined: 05-22-2005
Member Rating: 1.9


Message 41 of 43 (348126)
09-11-2006 1:45 PM
Reply to: Message 39 by nator
09-11-2006 12:16 PM


schraf writes:
...and thus, the culture at learge teaches morality.
Certainly the culture at large has an impact, but still the parents are the ones charged with the responsibility specifically for their own kids and we all have a responsibility to shape our own culture.

Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

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 Message 39 by nator, posted 09-11-2006 12:16 PM nator has replied

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nator
Member (Idle past 2170 days)
Posts: 12961
From: Ann Arbor
Joined: 12-09-2001


Message 42 of 43 (348318)
09-12-2006 7:16 AM
Reply to: Message 41 by GDR
09-11-2006 1:45 PM


quote:
Certainly the culture at large has an impact, but still the parents are the ones charged with the responsibility specifically for their own kids and we all have a responsibility to shape our own culture.
The point is, the culture at large influences the parents.
"Parents" do not exist in a vacuum.

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 Message 41 by GDR, posted 09-11-2006 1:45 PM GDR has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 43 by Silent H, posted 09-12-2006 7:38 AM nator has not replied

  
Silent H
Member (Idle past 5820 days)
Posts: 7405
From: satellite of love
Joined: 12-11-2002


Message 43 of 43 (348323)
09-12-2006 7:38 AM
Reply to: Message 42 by nator
09-12-2006 7:16 AM


The point is, the culture at large influences the parents. "Parents" do not exist in a vacuum.
While you are correct in a way, many parents have broken with the "culture at large" or belong to subcultures at large, and as such can and do instruct their children in ways sometimes wholly opposed to popular culture.
Certainly anyone in a culture is exposed to elements of that culture, but the degree to which one accepts different elements, and the way one wishes to arrange them or invent new ones makes your statement break down on the individual level. In a sense we really do live in a vaccuum, or can if we so choose.

holmes {in temp decloak from lurker mode}
"What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away." (D.Bros)

This message is a reply to:
 Message 42 by nator, posted 09-12-2006 7:16 AM nator has not replied

  
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