Carolyn Biltoft received her PhD in World History from Princeton University in 2010. Her work fuses the tools of world history, intellectual history, cultural studies and critical theory. Carolyn has thought deeply about the nature of truth, and realized that each person necessarily has an incomplete understanding, because we only experience a small aspect of reality first hand. Therefore, we need to trust the reports of others to gain a complete worldview. Misplacing our trust will compromise the accuracy of our model of reality. Carolyn delves into the implications of this insight, describes the similarities and differences between scientific and religious mindsets, and how this should impact our educational system.
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Meh. Agnostic fence-sitting and bet-hedging? Yawn...
ReplyDeleteNo, those believers who are nevertheless brilliant are geniuses despite their religious brain damage, not in tandem/symbiosis with it!!! Imagine how smart they would be sans superstition! I can give a free pass to noted historical figures of faith before the scientific era and universal education, but not to contemporaries; l can never see the latter as anything more than precocious children, at best...
No, trust in the scientific method is not the same as belief/faith!!! We may not be able to do original research in all areas of knowledge ourselves, but we all have access to first-hand experience of the process and its checks and balances. Mistakes are always corrected in the fullness of time, unlike within religion...
As for housewives, read The Feminine Mystique. Busy work expands to fill the day, so you're literally wasting your lives... Time-use studies also prove that women who work spend just as much quality time with their children as women who don't, so suck it!!! And children of working mothers mercifully don't inherit housewife genes...
Patriarchy as primordial stability? Nope! Evidence from unrelated areas of both the hard and soft sciences converges on the fact that Equality also provides stability, and did so long before Patriarchy emerged... Chaos ensues when these two types of social organization try to coexist, as there is no middle ground, because they undermine each other...
Homosexuality does threaten the patriarchy, because gay men can't be kept in line by the promise of having some woman allocated to them as long as they don't rock the boat. And yes, lesbians and independent women reduce the pool of women available for allocation. Any other objections to same sex unions and female empowerment are proximate, as are prohibitions against abortion. Forced birth is required to ensure that oppressed men have a genetic stake in continuing to support an otherwise untenable system...
And ending on the Socratic fallacy that if people only knew better they would be better? Unfortunately, no, because our brains are kluges that are no longer fit for purpose:
The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. - E. O. Wilson