What you can't say

I just got around to reading Paul Graham's What You Can't Say. What I find most ironic about the piece is that while he credits scientists with the tendency to be most open-minded and willing to look in unconventional directions, the scientific establishment is often most hostile to ideas that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy.

Another irony is that while religions are typically viewed as being most intolerant historically, today, religious views, particularly Christian ones, are often the most "unsayable" and people who hold to religious views most persecuted. One is considered intolerant, or worse, a bigot, if he dares to hold the view that abortion is wrong, homesexuality is a sin, and so on. And people look at you like a flat-earther if you're crazy enough to not believe that man evolved from "ape-like creatures".

Evolution is an example that connects both the scientific and religious cases. A university professor who teaches in the sciences really has to have guts nowadays to admit publicly that he doesn't believe in evolution. I often hear stories where a professor is let go, or doesn't get tenure, or whatever, because of his views on this issue. Similarly, any scientific papers which assume a young earth or in any way challenge the evolutionary hegemony (say, something that argues that the Biblical flood explains geological features better than some other theory) fall upon an extremely hostile scientific community and are very hard to get published.

Permalink | 10 Comments | Tags: Religion, Science | id 4699

04:09 (utc-5)
edited: 05:08 (utc-5)

 

Links

• (Feb 6, 1:05) ScrappleFace: Mass. High Court Grants 'Marriage' Benefits to Singles
• (Feb 6, 1:06) ScrappleFace: DNC Boss: Kerry, Edwards Went AWOL from Senate
• (Feb 6, 1:45) Roger L. Simon: Rawalpindi, Mon Amour - "A couple of years ago I never heard of Abdel Qadeer Khan (barely had heard of Musharraf) and I venture to say that?s true for the vast majority of you. Yet Mr. Khan was still doing his unbelievably horrifying work..."
• (Feb 6, 1:54) inluminent: Quote: Ignorance - Which is why I try to always hear out everybody. Even people like Michael Moore.
• (Feb 6, 2:30) Clickteam: Install Creator
• (Feb 6, 2:35) The Spirit Engine - A freeware RPG I'm trying out now. Via whisperstorm
• (Feb 6, 9:33) Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 - Oooh, XML 1.1 is a recommendation
• (Feb 6, 9:34) Simon Willison: Hot Links
• (Feb 6, 9:38) Stay with XML 1.0 (what's new in XML 1.1) - via Kayode
• (Feb 6, 9:39) Slashdot: Learning Computer Science via Assembly Language - via Kayode
• (Feb 6, 9:40) Programming from the Ground Up - "The difference between mediocre and star programmers is that star programmers understand assembly language, whether or not they use it on a daily basis."
• (Feb 6, 11:53) Sophos spam information
• (Feb 6, 11:55) How to beat an Adaptive Spam Filter (PowerPoint) - A presentation by John Graham-Cumming, Creator and Maintainer of POPFile. Via Kayode
• (Feb 6, 11:59) lgf: Who Does Hezbollah Worry About?
• (Feb 6, 15:45) Slashdot: Wolfram's New Kind of Science Now Online
• (Feb 6, 15:48) Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science | Online
• (Feb 6, 16:11) The Scheme Programming Language, 2nd Edition
• (Feb 6, 16:45) A Delicious Way To Personalize The Web - Robin Good' Sharewood Tidings
• (Feb 6, 18:39) hugeurl.com - totally pointless, but funny
• (Feb 6, 19:48) Terry Tate, Office Linebacker - via Mark
• (Feb 6, 21:46) social circles - via Christian
• (Feb 6, 22:00) Penguin Swing - Flash Game - 317.9 320.3 323.5 baby
• (Feb 6, 22:26) TCS: Tech Central Station - A New Politics - via Glenn. "A realignment is taking place in the politics of this country and indeed of the world at large. It is increasingly difficult to define the meanings of left and right, liberal and conservative.
• (Feb 6, 22:31) RWN's Favorite George W. Bush Quotes - Right Wing News
• (Feb 6, 22:38) SashaCastel.com: Nobody Cares About the Norks? - via Glenn. "Evil may prosper when good men do nothing; but it especially prospers when good men can't even look at it and speak its name."
• (Feb 6, 22:54) Belmont Club: Hitler's WMDs - "...it is not the Liberal expectation of war with perfect knowledge, no casualties and no collateral damage that is insidious... It is the requirement not to act until we have achieved it which actually guarantees its reverse"
• (Feb 6, 22:56) Lisp500 - "Lisp500 is a 500-line implementation of an informally specified dialect of Lisp. It attempts to be not too bug-ridden."
• (Feb 7, 3:01) Right Wing News: Happy Birthday Gipper
• (Feb 7, 3:03) Right Wing News: 10 Ways To Make Money Blogging
• (Feb 7, 16:25) MacDevCenter.com: LaTeX: It's Not Just for Academia, Part 1 [Feb. 03, 2004]
• (Feb 7, 16:59) The Guardian: Surging US economy leads global recovery
• (Feb 7, 17:02) DBAzine.com: Tuning Disk Architectures for Databases
• (Feb 7, 17:27) Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name: Homosexuality in animals - "For some people, what animals do is a yardstick of what is and isn't natural... They make a leap from saying if it's natural, it's morally and ethically desirable... Infanticide is widespread in the animal kingdom... to say it is desirable makes no sense
• (Feb 7, 17:31) Girl Dies After Second Head Is Removed - spooky
• (Feb 7, 17:38) Doctor prescribes Linux for more reliable networks, lower cost - The switch was made for ideological as well as strategic and financial reasons. It seems to have mostly turned out ok.
• (Feb 7, 17:40) MSDN: The C# Design Process: A Conversation with Anders Hejlsberg - via Slashdot
• (Feb 7, 17:46) c2.com/wiki: Design Patterns Book
• (Feb 7, 18:11) Instapundit.com: "Rumsfeld tells it like it is"
• (Feb 7, 18:44) JSP 2.0 Expression Language - JSP moves closer to Cheetah. Via Karl-Martin, via Erik
• (Feb 7, 18:49) Chaperon - "Chaperon is a project that converts structured text to XML." Via Karl-Martin, via Erik
• (Feb 7, 18:52) International Standard Date and Time Notation - I want to use the "day in a year" notation, "1995-035", as yet another possible permalink format for my weblog Yes, that makes me lame.
• (Feb 7, 19:00) Hektor.ch - And now for something completely different...
• (Feb 7, 19:02) AOL Music: Five For Fighting: '100 Years'
• (Feb 7, 19:04) Guido van Rossum: Python main() functions - Some tips on how to write your main() in Python. Via Karl-Martin, via Erik
• (Feb 7, 19:05) Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide - Via Karl-Martin, via Erik
• (Feb 7, 19:09) Are 64-bit Binaries Really Slower than 32-bit Binaries? - OSNews.com - Via Karl-Martin, via Erik
• (Feb 7, 19:19) The 100th episode of Angel: Interview with David Boreanaz and Charisma Carpenter - "...what a time to go--the 100th episode. I think everything has been explored for [Cordelia]. And it's really a sweet, sweet episode. Joss had written me a note and said this is one of the sweeter stories we've ever told. And I agree."

For links "as they happen", see http://del.icio.us/keith

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Random | id 4698

03:14 (utc-5)