In the mid-1800s, a man proposed a simple method for reducing the mortality rate of new mothers from 18% to less than 1%. His method was highly effective in preventing death, yet it was highly ridiculed among his peers. Despite repeated demonstrations in three different venues that it was effective, his proposal continued to be mocked and rejected for lack of scientific proof.
He spent the last years of his life fighting against the organizations who opposed him, even going so far to label their members ignoramuses and irresponsible murderers. The lives of countless women died as a result of no one acknowledging his idea for decades.
---
Across thirty years, more than five million people were exposed to a chemical that did not do what the authorities claimed it did. Despite its eventual denunciation, it was still widely distributed across the country. The chemical was linked to higher cancer rates, reproductive tract malformations, infertility, auto-immune disorders, feminization of boys, cysts, and neurological deficits. Its effects are still being studied and evaluated as it can cause genetic changes that affect multiple generations.
---
In the late 1950s, a similar group of people were responsible for handing out a substance that resulted in an estimated 10,000+ victims over four years, though the actual number is still unknown.
---
Responsible for at least 65,000 victims is another incident that left its victims often reduced to idiocy and unable to care for themselves.
---
All of these things happened within the last 200 years - long after the formation and adoption of the Scientific Method (My thanks go out to: The Personality Cult of Socrates; The Very Influential and Islamic al-Basra; the Persian Exerimental Scientist al-Biruni; Revivalist of Logic in Islam, Avicenna; and The Theological Reformer Roger Bacon).
If I held any of these incidents against the group that perpetrated them, I'd never take my kid to his scheduled appointments with his doctor.
People with authority are in a position to commit horrific miscarriages of justice, and so long as they retain that power, they can escape the consequences. That's how we end up with Enron. That's how we end up with the Semmelweis Reflex.
The notion that it's all religion's fault and wouldn't happen any other way is justification of hate and nothing more.
The X virtuous men of history or whatever
Moderator: Moderators
Wow, what a bullshit argument. I don't suppose you're familiar with the post hoc fallacy, Maj?Maj wrote: All of these things happened within the last 200 years - long after the formation and adoption of the Scientific Method
I could just as easily say "these things happened long after the formation and adoption of religion."
Who are you responding to? I certainly never claimed that ALL of the world's problems were caused by religion. I just said that religious thought was inherently bad and results in horrible, awful things as a direct result of its nature.The notion that it's all religion's fault and wouldn't happen any other way is justification of hate and nothing more.
Last edited by Caedrus on Sat Aug 01, 2009 3:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
Actually, I am, and it doesn't apply.Caedrus wrote:Wow, what a bullshit argument. I don't suppose you're familiar with the post hoc fallacy, Maj?
I'm not saying in any way that the Scientific Method caused all of those things. I'm saying that all of those things happened despite the Scientific Method being around. Understanding and using the Scientific Method didn't help.
The general tone of this thread is: Religion only does bad things. If religion didn't exist, people wouldn't be bad. There are no examples of massive tragedy that aren't caused by religion. Religion kills everything it touches.Caedrus wrote:Who are you responding to?
My point has always been that it's not Religion's fault that people are asshats. Sort of that Post Hoc fallacy again... Just because someone claims a religion doesn't mean that religion is the cause of their evil. They may use it to justify their evil, but blaming religion for it just exonerates the bastards.
My son makes me laugh. Maybe he'll make you laugh, too.
Fixed for accuracy.Maj wrote:The general tone of this thread is: Religion does bad things. If religion didn't exist, people would be significantly less bad. There are countless examples of massive tragedy that are caused by religion. Religion taints everything it touches
The version you actually posted was a horrifically crappy strawman argument. Specifically, an argument against false extremes.
And of course you have no argument to make against those statements (the ones in the edited quote). Religion is evil. There are countless examples of massive tragedy that are caused by religion. Religion does taint everyone it converts with a mode of thought that is incompatible with reason.
So... you made no point whatsoever then. You just made a completely irrelevant mention of the scientific method after mentioning a bunch of irrelevant incidents. That's what you're saying, if you say that your statements inferred no causal relation. It's just a non-sequitor.I'm not saying in any way that the Scientific Method caused all of those things. I'm saying that all of those things happened despite the Scientific Method being around. Understanding and using the Scientific Method didn't help.
You might as well have said "Religion happened despite the scientific method being around" or "this happened despite science being around" or "slave trading happened despite the sky being around."
Last edited by Caedrus on Mon Aug 10, 2009 5:26 am, edited 3 times in total.
-
Ganbare Gincun
- Duke
- Posts: 1022
- Joined: Wed Mar 11, 2009 4:42 am
No one is saying that religion is the ONLY reason why people act badly towards each other. What we ARE saying is that religion allows theocratic authorities and true believers alike to commit shocking atrocities towards their fellow humans with little more justification then "the theocracy/my holy book/the voices in my head told me that this was the right thing to do". It always ends up with people being violated and butchered, and the religions in question never even acknowledge that they have done anything wrong, much less apologize for the atrocities committed in the name of their God.Maj wrote:My point has always been that it's not Religion's fault that people are asshats. Sort of that Post Hoc fallacy again... Just because someone claims a religion doesn't mean that religion is the cause of their evil. They may use it to justify their evil, but blaming religion for it just exonerates the bastards.
Of course.Ganbare Gincun wrote:No one is saying that religion is the ONLY reason why people act badly towards each other.
All dogs are mammals, but not all mammals are dogs.
All religion is bad, but not all bad is religion.
Very simple. Maj is just obstinately straw manning by claiming that we are saying all that is bad is religion. That is not a logically equivelent statement to all religion is bad.
Last edited by Caedrus on Mon Aug 10, 2009 6:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
Maj wrote:I'm not saying in any way that the Scientific Method caused all of those things. I'm saying that all of those things happened despite the Scientific Method being around. Understanding and using the Scientific Method didn't help.
I will actually go one step further and dismiss completely the notion and myth of the Vulcan scientist. Man is a complex creature; he is able to create the most wonderful systems and procedures and at the same time completely fail to follow them. Emotions and even stubborn pride interfere with systems and procedures whether they are those of science, of law, of business or even of religion.
This is why many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of mankind were vehemently opposed by other scientists. From continental drift, to relativity, to even quantum mechanics, even the most brilliant minds fall to this trap.
Another problem of man’s complex nature is that nothing is done in isolation. This is why for most of the history of modern science and even engineering, it was the scientists and engineers themselves that were mixing their craft with religion and philosophy. One only has to read any 19th or 18th century engineering text to see whole chapters waxing about moral conditions of the time within the engineering text.
We often mistakenly wax nostalgic about Greek and Roman science, but in fact they both sucked. They sucked for different reasons, but in order to understand why they sucked you need to understand the basic principles without which science is flat out impossible to do right.
The first thing is you need people to come up with ideas. That’s the easy part, ironically. But ideas are useless unless they are tested and one cannot test ideas without data. Science relies on people, whose job and duty it is to collect data. Ironically, in the history of modern science, this duty originally fell on religious monastics that not only were literate but actually, were bored out of their minds with nothing better to do. This is why to this day data collection is called “clerical work.”
The Greeks didn’t do “clerical work.” Most of the Greek scientists thought that was beneath them, so unless you had a “Eureka” moment, (in other words you observed it yourself) there was a good chance you were flat out wrong. If you want to see some of the greatest stupid moments of the early medieval period, most of them are due to the fact that in rediscovering the works of the Greeks and Romans they simply assumed that they had to be right in the first place.
The Romans, on the other hand, didn’t do “science.” They were, first and foremost, engineers. Ironically, this was a good thing because physical things do physical things when you don’t get them right in the first place. (Like fall down, for example.) Thus the notion of observation was built into the very things they built because there were always plenty of people to tell them what went wrong.
Science, in the end, isn’t based on rules, since we don’t often follow even the ones we make for ourselves, or in an attempt to create a pure “logical” mode of thinking. It is based on the dedication to the mundane task of observation and recording said observations, and the virtue of humility to know one can be wrong and to follow those observations wherever they may lead. In a sense this is true for engineering as well; Edison didn’t just invent the filament for the light bulb, he had to weed through the hundreds of filaments that would not work for the light bulb. Edison had to be wrong many times before he could be right.
This is why many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of mankind were vehemently opposed by other scientists. From continental drift, to relativity, to even quantum mechanics, even the most brilliant minds fall to this trap.
Another problem of man’s complex nature is that nothing is done in isolation. This is why for most of the history of modern science and even engineering, it was the scientists and engineers themselves that were mixing their craft with religion and philosophy. One only has to read any 19th or 18th century engineering text to see whole chapters waxing about moral conditions of the time within the engineering text.
We often mistakenly wax nostalgic about Greek and Roman science, but in fact they both sucked. They sucked for different reasons, but in order to understand why they sucked you need to understand the basic principles without which science is flat out impossible to do right.
The first thing is you need people to come up with ideas. That’s the easy part, ironically. But ideas are useless unless they are tested and one cannot test ideas without data. Science relies on people, whose job and duty it is to collect data. Ironically, in the history of modern science, this duty originally fell on religious monastics that not only were literate but actually, were bored out of their minds with nothing better to do. This is why to this day data collection is called “clerical work.”
The Greeks didn’t do “clerical work.” Most of the Greek scientists thought that was beneath them, so unless you had a “Eureka” moment, (in other words you observed it yourself) there was a good chance you were flat out wrong. If you want to see some of the greatest stupid moments of the early medieval period, most of them are due to the fact that in rediscovering the works of the Greeks and Romans they simply assumed that they had to be right in the first place.
The Romans, on the other hand, didn’t do “science.” They were, first and foremost, engineers. Ironically, this was a good thing because physical things do physical things when you don’t get them right in the first place. (Like fall down, for example.) Thus the notion of observation was built into the very things they built because there were always plenty of people to tell them what went wrong.
Science, in the end, isn’t based on rules, since we don’t often follow even the ones we make for ourselves, or in an attempt to create a pure “logical” mode of thinking. It is based on the dedication to the mundane task of observation and recording said observations, and the virtue of humility to know one can be wrong and to follow those observations wherever they may lead. In a sense this is true for engineering as well; Edison didn’t just invent the filament for the light bulb, he had to weed through the hundreds of filaments that would not work for the light bulb. Edison had to be wrong many times before he could be right.
Ganbare Gincun wrote:No one is saying that religion is the ONLY reason why people act badly towards each other. What we ARE saying is that religion allows theocratic authorities and true believers alike to commit shocking atrocities towards their fellow humans with little more justification then "the theocracy/my holy book/the voices in my head told me that this was the right thing to do". It always ends up with people being violated and butchered, and the religions in question never even acknowledge that they have done anything wrong, much less apologize for the atrocities committed in the name of their God.
That is, at face value, total nonsense. To suggest that a thing has the power to allow something implies that it has the power to not allow the opposite and chooses not to. Religion can’t do a thing; it’s a concept, an organization, a structure. It’s a dead parrot! (At this point the Monty Python “dead parrot sketch” is appropriate.)
Authority is self forming and self justifying. Authority can use any excuse it wants to. Not all excuses work, however. What works is often what resonates with the people; with the people’s daily life and routines. Thus religion is not the cause of authority; it is the effect. Obey me because I am a god. Obey me because I am the son of a god. Obey me because a god tells you to. This works because it’s his word against … well against no one really.
Remove “religion” from the equation and you still have self forming and self justifying authority. From the chaos of the French Revolution to the evils of the Soviet Union, removing religion did not stop people fro behaving “religiously” in their absolute blind zeal of their absolute goals.
Religion is the dead parrot, don’t blame religion, blame the idiots who keep hitting you with the dead parrot and not the dead parrot. Dead parrots don’t hurt people, people wielding dead parrots hurt people!
Authority is self forming and self justifying. Authority can use any excuse it wants to. Not all excuses work, however. What works is often what resonates with the people; with the people’s daily life and routines. Thus religion is not the cause of authority; it is the effect. Obey me because I am a god. Obey me because I am the son of a god. Obey me because a god tells you to. This works because it’s his word against … well against no one really.
Remove “religion” from the equation and you still have self forming and self justifying authority. From the chaos of the French Revolution to the evils of the Soviet Union, removing religion did not stop people fro behaving “religiously” in their absolute blind zeal of their absolute goals.
Religion is the dead parrot, don’t blame religion, blame the idiots who keep hitting you with the dead parrot and not the dead parrot. Dead parrots don’t hurt people, people wielding dead parrots hurt people!
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
This is wrong on many levels.tzor wrote:That is, at face value, total nonsense. To suggest that a thing has the power to allow something implies that it has the power to not allow the opposite and chooses not to. Religion can’t do a thing; it’s a concept, an organization, a structure.
You are claiming that organizations can make choices but can't take actions. The truth is exactly the opposite. Organizations are not moral agents, but they do have effects. Like factories or gravity they change what humans around them do even though they are passive onlookers and cannot and will not choose to be other than what they are.
Operation Rescue is a terrorist organization that murders people. It's not a person and has no brain, so it can't choose to not be that. It exists only as a pile of propaganda and a bank account. It murders people by its nature, by encouraging real humans who are individually moral agents to commit atrocity on its behalf.
Things can have negative effects without making choices. Religious memes and disease genes do not make choices because they are just pieces of information, verbal or genetic. But they can still kill. And they do, all the time. Cystic Fibrosis kills people. It does not choose to kill people, and it cannot choose to not kill people. Same with faith. Faith cannot choose to be reasonable.
-Username17
No Frank, that’s the exact opposite of what I am saying, and you are pulling a dictionary wank here in order to make your argument. “Organization” means the act or process of organizing (to arrange or constitute into a coherent unity in which each part has a special function or relation). Not per see Religion as an institution. (An institution may be linked to a religion but then we are dealing with the institution; a specific instance thereof.)
Organizations consist of people. People have brains; people have actions. It is the people who organize and form authority. In short, organizations don’t create tyrants; tyrants create organizations. You have the cause and effect backwards. Comparing religious memes to genes is about as fire and water as you can get.
Operation Rescue consists of people; they are the ones with the brains. Some of those brains organized the organization; some gave it a “mission” (basically to hide the fact that the purpose of all organizations is to give the guy who organized it an excuse to tell others to do bullshit for him); and some gave the commands that were needed to carry out that “mission.” The “Mission” of Operation Rescue didn’t walk around grabbing people into its clutches; the “Mission” of Operation Rescue can’t do a damn thing because it’s an inanimate structural concept.
Operation Rescue doesn’t murder anyone, people under the structure of Operation Rescue murder people! That was and still is my point!
Organizations consist of people. People have brains; people have actions. It is the people who organize and form authority. In short, organizations don’t create tyrants; tyrants create organizations. You have the cause and effect backwards. Comparing religious memes to genes is about as fire and water as you can get.
Operation Rescue consists of people; they are the ones with the brains. Some of those brains organized the organization; some gave it a “mission” (basically to hide the fact that the purpose of all organizations is to give the guy who organized it an excuse to tell others to do bullshit for him); and some gave the commands that were needed to carry out that “mission.” The “Mission” of Operation Rescue didn’t walk around grabbing people into its clutches; the “Mission” of Operation Rescue can’t do a damn thing because it’s an inanimate structural concept.
Operation Rescue doesn’t murder anyone, people under the structure of Operation Rescue murder people! That was and still is my point!
-
Heath Robinson
- Knight
- Posts: 393
- Joined: Sun Aug 17, 2008 9:26 am
- Location: Blighty
Your assertion that science isn't based on rules because scientists are human and break those rules on occasion is a Fallacy of Composition. A parallel would be that Christians are human and take actions which violate the rules laid down in the bible, thus Christianity does not follow the rules of its holy book. Individual Republicans break the law, therefore the Republican party breaks the law is another example of such a fallacy.tzor wrote:I will actually go one step further and dismiss completely the notion and myth of the Vulcan scientist. Man is a complex creature; he is able to create the most wonderful systems and procedures and at the same time completely fail to follow them. Emotions and even stubborn pride interfere with systems and procedures whether they are those of science, of law, of business or even of religion.
<snip/>
Science, in the end, isn’t based on rules, since we don’t often follow even the ones we make for ourselves, or in an attempt to create a pure “logical” mode of thinking. It is based on the dedication to the mundane task of observation and recording said observations, and the virtue of humility to know one can be wrong and to follow those observations wherever they may lead. In a sense this is true for engineering as well; Edison didn’t just invent the filament for the light bulb, he had to weed through the hundreds of filaments that would not work for the light bulb. Edison had to be wrong many times before he could be right.
The reliance on observational evidence is one part amongst many of the doctrine of empirical science. Another is the use of tools that make it easy to locate and correct logical errors, as well as a social construct that devotes many eyes to the task of checking the accumulated knowledge and enables someone to change the material if they can persuade people of the error. For a gross mistake to escape from notice it would require that it escape the notice of every person who parses the material containing that mistake.
Face it. Today will be as bad a day as any other.
My assertion is that science is based on principles developed by people who in turn come up with “rules” so that the principles can be applied. In the end; it the people not the principles or the rules, that drive things. These people change the principles all the time; they change the rules, they fail to live up to the principles and rules they create.Heath Robinson wrote:Your assertion that science isn't based on rules because scientists are human and break those rules on occasion ...
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Sorry Tzor, you just Godwinned this thread. For reals.
What the fuck man? The message itself is hateful. The fact that it can only actually murder people through the agency of humans doesn't excuse the message from being a thing that right minded people should fight against.
-Username17
Tzor wrote:Religion is the dead parrot, don’t blame religion, blame the idiots who keep hitting you with the dead parrot and not the dead parrot. Dead parrots don’t hurt people, people wielding dead parrots hurt people!
Huh. Let's take that a bit farther for a moment. Nazism. Yes, thread Godwin. I understand. But it's also the key point. You are seriously telling us to not blame or even condemn Nazism for the acts of murder carried out in its name because those acts were carried out industrially by a large number of individual specific people.Tzor wrote:Operation Rescue doesn’t murder anyone, people under the structure of Operation Rescue murder people! That was and still is my point!
What the fuck man? The message itself is hateful. The fact that it can only actually murder people through the agency of humans doesn't excuse the message from being a thing that right minded people should fight against.
-Username17
It always bothered me that in D&D, creatures who are Evil get to act good and do nice things and fall in love and have puppies, while Good people brush their teeth incorrectly and all of a sudden lose their awesome powers of Rainbows and Dreams.Caedrus wrote:Religion is evil. There are countless examples of massive tragedy that are caused by religion. Religion does taint everyone it converts with a mode of thought that is incompatible with reason.
But then I see this real world attitude and totally understand. It doesn't matter how many people Mother Teresa helped. Or Gandhi. The Crusades negate those people. It doesn't matter how many houses a church helped build after a natural disaster. It doesn't matter how many drugs and vaccines they provide to people who are sick. Child molesters make those things irrelevant.
Because Religion is Evil. Its attempts to do good are just more Evil in disguise.
There is nothing in the history of the world that will ever be Good with that sort of standard.
There seems to be some sort of implication that people who embrace Science and its method are immune to commiting horrific acts of mass injury and death. I tried to demonstrate that wasn't the case. Why does that have to mean that I believe that it's Science's fault those things happened?Caedrus wrote:You just made a completely irrelevant mention of the scientific method after mentioning a bunch of irrelevant incidents.
The fallacy you linked to seems to me to be the one committed over and over and over again in this thread: Just because a person claims religious affiliation doesn't mean it's the religion's fault that person committed atrocities.
That's like me saying atheism is evil because real atheists preyed on people by setting up cults of personality, establishing totalitarian regimes, and murdering millions of people.
The problem isn't atheism. It's an asshat who wants absolute power and will say/do anything it takes to get it - even going so far as to make up a religion for innocents to buy into.
My son makes me laugh. Maybe he'll make you laugh, too.
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Yes. It does.Maj wrote:It doesn't matter how many people Mother Teresa helped.
Mother Theresa ran a fucking hospice care site. In a country with national health insurance. And she kept people there to die in Jesus' arms who had treatable diseases. And when she got money for her order it was used to increase the size of the operation rather than to provide medical care to people.
Mother Theresa was a fucking murderer. And it matters.
-Username17
Last edited by Username17 on Tue Aug 11, 2009 2:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
-
Ganbare Gincun
- Duke
- Posts: 1022
- Joined: Wed Mar 11, 2009 4:42 am
Hold on. Full stop. Are you telling me that India - the second most populous country in the world, widely considered by most Americans to be little more then a Third World shithole to be exploited for cheap labor - has national health insurance, and the United States doesn't?FrankTrollman wrote:Mother Theresa ran a fucking hospice care site. In a country with national health insurance.
Health Care in India:
[url=http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/india/India-ranks-171-out-of-175-in-public-health-spending-says-WHO-study/articleshow/4879566.cms wrote:Times of India[/url] {OK}]India ranks 171 out of the 175 countries in the world in public health spending.
This is less than some of the sub-Saharan African countries, a World Health Organization (WHO) study of 2007-08 has revealed. This being the status, can we tackle the existing epidemics and new entries like H1N1 flu?
For a country of one billion, India spends 5.2% of the GDP on healthcare. While 4.3% is spent by the private sector, the government continues to spend only 0.9% on public health. When the economic growth index is moving forward, the wellness index is dipping.
‘‘Public health spending as a percentage of GDP is minuscule. Due to this India is being overly dependent on private sector. With lowest insurance penetration people are forced to spend out of their resources. In fact, neighbouring China ranks among the leading developing countries in public health spending, almost 6% of the GDP,’’ said Vishal Bali, CEO, Wockhardt hospitals.
While India ranks among the top 10 countries for communicable disease, it is today, world leader of chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension and coronary artery disease.
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_India wrote:Wikipedia[/url] {OK}]Healthcare in India is the responsibility of constituent states and territories of India. The Constitution charges every state with "raising of the level of nutrition and the standard of living of its people and the improvement of public health as among its primary duties". The National Health Policy was endorsed by the Parliament of India in 1983 and updated in 2002.
Although India has eradicated mass famines, half of children in India are underweight, one of the highest rates in the world and nearly double the rate of Sub-Saharan Africa. Water supply and sanitation in India continue to be abysmal; only one of three Indians has access to improved sanitation facilities such as toilet. India's HIV/AIDS epidemic is a growing threat. Cholera epidemics are not unknown. The maternal mortality in India is the second highest in the world.
Providing healthcare and disease prevention to India’s growing population of more than a billion people becomes challenging in the face of depleting resources. 2.47 million people in India are estimated to be HIV positive. India is one of the four countries worldwide where polio has not as yet been successfully eradicated and one third of the world’s tuberculosis cases are in India.
According to the World Health Organization 900,000 Indians die each year from drinking contaminated water and breathing in polluted air. As India grapples with these basic issues, new challenges are emerging for example there is a rise in chronic adult diseases such as cardiovascular illnesses and diabetes as a consequence of changing lifestyles.
There are vast disparities in people’s health even among the different states across the country largely attributed to the resource allocation by the state governments where some states have been more successful than others. Better efforts are needed by the local governments to ensure that the health services provided are actually reaching the poor in worst-affected areas.
My son makes me laugh. Maybe he'll make you laugh, too.
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Considering it to be a third world shithole is not unreasonable. Its healthcare system is ranked 112th on Earth and more than half the people get born without being attended by a healthcare professional. But the nation does have a comprehensive immunization program, and if you live in the cities you get subsidized healthcare. But of course, she operated in cities, so um... yeah.Ganbare Gincun wrote:Hold on. Full stop. Are you telling me that India - the second most populous country in the world, widely considered by most Americans to be little more then a Third World shithole to be exploited for cheap labor - has national health insurance, and the United States doesn't?FrankTrollman wrote:Mother Theresa ran a fucking hospice care site. In a country with national health insurance.
Mother Teresa's stuff is a sham. She got driven around in a limo and went on about how the suffering of disease and poverty were good for people. Which of course, explains why she reused hypodermic needles between patients and advocated against condoms even in her homes for AIDS victims.
-Username17
-
Heath Robinson
- Knight
- Posts: 393
- Joined: Sun Aug 17, 2008 9:26 am
- Location: Blighty
The National Health Policy was officially endorsed in 1983, and Mother Teresa began her work in 1950.
You can look at the criticism of her work in the final paragraph of the Missionaries of Charity section of her Wikipedia entry. Whilst the healthcare may have been negligent compared to the standards required in Europe, it's not to say it wasn't better than the other options available. Remember that Asia had seen some quite terrible combat during WW2 and India was still suffering from our regime (of quite unreasonable brutality - gosh, I do so love being British).
You can look at the criticism of her work in the final paragraph of the Missionaries of Charity section of her Wikipedia entry. Whilst the healthcare may have been negligent compared to the standards required in Europe, it's not to say it wasn't better than the other options available. Remember that Asia had seen some quite terrible combat during WW2 and India was still suffering from our regime (of quite unreasonable brutality - gosh, I do so love being British).
Last edited by Heath Robinson on Tue Aug 11, 2009 2:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
Face it. Today will be as bad a day as any other.
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Sure. And she gets a free pass in the 1950s because no one knew any better or had any better ideas. But she does not get a pass in the 90s when she is demanding that AIDS sufferers be denied condoms and is collecting people with minor ailments in rooms with people dying of TB and then reusing hypodermic needles between them.
"It was the 50s, people were stupid back then" is an excuse that stops working when it is not the internet age and the fucking Lancet has done a piece on how and why your methods suck and you refuse to change.
-Username17
"It was the 50s, people were stupid back then" is an excuse that stops working when it is not the internet age and the fucking Lancet has done a piece on how and why your methods suck and you refuse to change.
-Username17
-
Heath Robinson
- Knight
- Posts: 393
- Joined: Sun Aug 17, 2008 9:26 am
- Location: Blighty
Oh, yes. I wasn't trying to say she was providing good medical care once the surrounding healthcare apparatus was on track, nor did I mean to imply that her religious hangups didn't make her outright reject appropriate medical practices that should have been no-brainers. I do believe that one must present all the information, and a short note about the conditions she was operating in when she started her work is the merest amount of credit one could give her.
But, yeah, her policy decisions did kill quite a number of people and she basically did not bear much guilt about that fact due to her religious beliefs. Perhaps if she'd had more doubt there might be people living today that aren't.
But, yeah, her policy decisions did kill quite a number of people and she basically did not bear much guilt about that fact due to her religious beliefs. Perhaps if she'd had more doubt there might be people living today that aren't.
Face it. Today will be as bad a day as any other.
First of all I understand you “hate” religion; in fact I would even say you hate religion religiously. “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you.” Never the less, you can’t argue against a general category by using a specific category. If you want to prove that all religion is evil, where religions are many, you can’t compare it to a specific political movement. Or are you going to insist that all political movements are evil and Nazism is one of many political movements that are all evil.FrankTrollman wrote:Huh. Let's take that a bit farther for a moment. Nazism. Yes, thread Godwin. I understand. But it's also the key point.
For that matter Saint Mother Teresa has nothing to do with the argument either. Now we go from general, to specific to the individual. Yes there were nice despots in human history; that doesn’t mean dictatorship is peachy.
But none of that matters Frank, when all you want to see is evil. Religion is evil, all religions are evil, and all religious people are evil. And this evil is “hate.” You hate religions and all religious people. You must tear them all down at all costs because you are consumed by this hate. You are blind to everything but what you think you hate, and what you think you hate, you want to destroy.
In other words, Frank, you are a Nazi.
(There, the Godwin law has been satisfied. Can someone actually prove why all religions are evil without bringing some Wagnerian pseudo-pagans who thought that they actually had better genes than everyone else?)
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Look, Hitler was a Catholic right up to the day he died. He's yours. Also, he got papal endorsement, as did Slovakia, Croatia, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Romania. Fascism in Europe is very much the final crusade.
But regardless, take your false equivalency and shove it up your ass. Religion is harmful because it doesn't do anything good and it does do stuff that's bad. Religion is a methodology for understanding the world and a set of memes to tell people what to do that are inherently resistant to change because they are based on non-rational criteria.
As a methodology for understanding the world it is a failure. Time and time again it has been shown that one gains no understanding of how the world around us functions by consulting ancient myths. That's one of the least effective methods for gaining knowledge available to us. Seriously, you'd do at least as well just looking at shit and making up your own wild ass speculations. To the extent that religion exists and attempts to answer peoples' questions it is bad because it doesn't have any answers or any method of getting any answers.
And the next part is based on belief. I am a progressive industrialist. I believe that change is good. Religion is by its nature anti-change. Whatever its commandments are, no matter how nice for its original time and place, human progress will catch up and surpass it. The things it tells you to do will someday be backwards, regressive, and pathetic. The social system it espouses will eventually be cruel and exclusionary compared to what is available.
That the major religions of today weren't ever nice things even for their time and place is an interesting anecdote. Christianity and Islam were NEVER good things. But even if you made a religion that was a net positive today, it wouldn't take a hundred years for our civilization to catch and surpass it, and then your religion would go on being negative for the rest of its existence.
-Username17
But regardless, take your false equivalency and shove it up your ass. Religion is harmful because it doesn't do anything good and it does do stuff that's bad. Religion is a methodology for understanding the world and a set of memes to tell people what to do that are inherently resistant to change because they are based on non-rational criteria.
As a methodology for understanding the world it is a failure. Time and time again it has been shown that one gains no understanding of how the world around us functions by consulting ancient myths. That's one of the least effective methods for gaining knowledge available to us. Seriously, you'd do at least as well just looking at shit and making up your own wild ass speculations. To the extent that religion exists and attempts to answer peoples' questions it is bad because it doesn't have any answers or any method of getting any answers.
And the next part is based on belief. I am a progressive industrialist. I believe that change is good. Religion is by its nature anti-change. Whatever its commandments are, no matter how nice for its original time and place, human progress will catch up and surpass it. The things it tells you to do will someday be backwards, regressive, and pathetic. The social system it espouses will eventually be cruel and exclusionary compared to what is available.
That the major religions of today weren't ever nice things even for their time and place is an interesting anecdote. Christianity and Islam were NEVER good things. But even if you made a religion that was a net positive today, it wouldn't take a hundred years for our civilization to catch and surpass it, and then your religion would go on being negative for the rest of its existence.
-Username17
And what a nice "Catholic" he was, "Dachau also served as the central camp for Christian religious prisoners. According to records of the Roman Catholic Church, at least 3,000 preachers, deacons, priests, and bishops were imprisoned there." (Wiki) With members like that, who needs you Frank?FrankTrollman wrote:Look, Hitler was a Catholic right up to the day he died.
It's not ragardless, you have to find the worst people in history and find any way to tie them to religion. You go about this in an almost obsessive manner. You build a nice gold plated straw man that demands that "religion" is the opposite of progress. Frank, there is only one thing to say about that; it's crap! Pure, unadulterated organic fertilizer kind of crap.
Meanwhile ...
Yes indeed, what a brave new world you are advocating! The "worship" of scientific advancement. Almost sounds like a "religion." Fancy that. You've met your enemy; it's you! Hypocrite!Progressivism is a political and social term that refers to ideologies and movements favoring or advocating changes or reform, usually in a statist or egalitarian direction for economic policies (government management) and liberal direction for social policies (personal choice). Progressivism is often viewed in opposition to conservative ideologies.
Technological utopianism (often called techno-utopianism or technoutopianism) refers to any ideology based on the belief that advances in science and technology will eventually bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal.
Techno-progressivism, technoprogressivism, tech-progressivism or techprogressivism (a portmanteau combining "technoscience-focused" and "progressivism") is a stance of active support for the convergence of technological change and social change. Techno-progressives argue that technological developments can be profoundly empowering and emancipatory when they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities to ensure that their costs, risks and benefits are all fairly shared by the actual stakeholders to those developments
Last edited by tzor on Tue Aug 11, 2009 5:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Surely you aren't saying that Catholicism stands for not torturing their own people? Yes, the fact that there were catholics who were arrested for being communists or Jews or Sinti or gay. Of course, that very wiki article you linked to gives as a citation just two example Christians imprisoned, one of whom was a Protestant Theologian. But it doesn't matter. Christians of every sect murder each other. It's one of their big things.tzor wrote:And what a nice "Catholic" he was, "Dachau also served as the central camp for Christian religious prisoners. According to records of the Roman Catholic Church, at least 3,000 preachers, deacons, priests, and bishops were imprisoned there." (Wiki) With members like that, who needs you Frank?
Hitler was a Catholic. Suck it.
-Username17