Gravity again

[Ian Livingston]

I've heard that line of reasoning before, Rev'd, and I truly would like to
think it could be so. Maybe, if the scientists can find a way to extricate
themselves from the corporations and the military, there could be hope,
but, from here, it looks an awful lot like the corporates want to fix the
world's problems by setting up a major die-off of low-income people and
general enslavement of those that refuse to die on schedule. Science may
discover ways to avert disaster, but the capitalists decide where the power
goes for now. They are still hoping science will make virtual immortality
possible so that they can become the deified, immortal lords of the masses.
Count me with whom you will, I don't hold out much hope for life on Earth
unless a major overturning of the system comes about.

I certainly agree that pure science, that is, science for the sake of
learning, is far more likely a beneficial guide than religion, which, while
falling, is not as dead as Alice claims. It is, in fact, greed and its
handmaid, religion, that drive the wars, that drive the oppression of the
poor, and that continue the quest for a new manifest destiny, and the tools
of the immoderate are the products of scientific inquiry. So, I reiterate,
the only way to make room for a more beneficent structure is to deprive the
existing one of its creative resources, by divesting inquiry and experiment
from their current owners and masters. And how, pray, might that happen?


On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 10:28 PM, Rev'd Seventy-Six <revd.76 at gmail.com>wrote:

> "...traditions are useless now. The scientists took over and they don't
> believe in anything except hubris and machines."
>
> I disagree.  I'm an agnostic, personally, but I've read a great many
> interviews with scientists who consider themselves moral & ethical
> Christians, Coptics, Muslims, Jainists, u.s.w.  Their faiths-- even those
> noted for being exceptionally exacting & stringent in their practices --do
> not Conflict with their chosen fields because religious dogma *doesn't
> have a place in what they're doing,* except in the usual academic / peer
> worship sense.  I might be making your point for you here, who knows.  They
> are individuals, first & foremost, and make the same crap decisions as
> anyone else; popular opinion seems to be against them because their actions
> have a greater probability of having greater consequences than that of the
> average schlemiel.  Witness the regular whipping science has received by
> the (extremely monied, fundamentalist-supported) anti-climate change
> crowd.  I do not sense P making any judgment against science or scientists
> in his novels.  As an engineer he admires them and sympathizes with their
> peculiar place in critical events.
>
> The men who made rocketry possible were engaged in an entirely different
> kind of worship than you or I might be able to conceive of, but certainly
> not a satanic one.  Witness Franz Pökler.*  *For all the horror that made
> the space program possible...  I wince when I think about it because my
> father was granted a scholarship by NASA  --yet,* it made the space
> program possible.*  Any evolution is always a tortured dark crawl out of
> the ignorant muck.  That's the history of our species and its spiritual
> evolution as a whole.  Hubris or not, we might be a little wiser, a little
> nearer the light than the last batch.  Who's to say the greater evolution
> of science isn't to become a worldwide religion that's *cool, but cares*?*
>
> *
> You're obviously making a generalization, I just can't quite parse your
> tone.  You make it sound like the game's over and humanity lost.  In my
> hopelessly biased view scientists may be among the most qualified to
> extricate us from the many, many messes capitalism-driven industry and
> religion have wrought before it's too late.  My longtime girlfriend is an
> animist and a cancer specialist & naturally I think the world of her so she
> may've influenced my thinking in this, but:  I've been rereading GR
> slooowly over the past month and it seems to me while P can be cynical he's
> irreducibly an optimist.  I don't believe he's going to write our species
> off with BE.  P don't judge.
>
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