It might seem odd to talk about science in religious terms, but I find something akin to sacredness in science. When I think about Newton’s Laws of Motion, for example, I am struck not just with a rational response but also with an emotional one. There’s a feeling of awe, of mystery, a deep profundity that manifests itself in almost religious terms.
I can recognise the intellectual and rational character of those laws, but I can’t ignore the feeling those laws evoke in me, either.
To have the contribution of someone like Newton dismissed because he is a “dead, white male” makes my blood boil. It makes me want to hurl profanities, because they’re profaning something that is ‘sacred’.
I get the same impulse whenever the 2+2=5 gang rear their empty heads, or whenever some egregious fuckwit wibbles on about “indigenous science”, or whenever some cretinous clump of brain-dead cells opines on how mathematics upholds “white supremacy”.
In the entire history of the world no one, ever, when hitting their thumb with a hammer, said “Oh, dearie me, I appear to have hurt my thumb. What a jolly silly thing to have done. I’m a nincompoop”
Seeing how the ‘woke’ impugn science is like this for me. It’s a hammer vs thumb moment and fuck, yes, I’m going to swear.
Newton was a bit of a weirdo - and someone you probably wouldn’t want to invite over for dinner on a Friday evening. In human terms he definitely isn’t the finest example we’ve ever produced. In scientific terms, however, he’s an absolute colossus.
Was he racist? Did he own slaves? Did he have a shitty attitude towards women? Maybe, possibly, who knows? But I simply don’t give a fuck - because this has nothing whatsoever to do with his contributions to science. It wouldn’t be too much of a distortion to split science into “before Newton” and “after Newton”.
This attempt to smear the magnificent scientific legacy of our forefathers on the grounds that they weren’t squeaky-clean Mother Theresa-like saints who would put Jesus to shame, or that, horror beyond horrors, they were white, makes me furious.
I once saw a clip of an interview where some “scholar”, some academic excrescence, derided mathematics as a “tool of oppression” because, wait for it, it had been used when doing the accounting in the slave trading ledgers.
These people need a brainioplasty. They need their skulls scraping out and the material replaced with the flesh on their forearms - they’d be able to think more clearly.
The pomo pillocks have followed a deliberate strategy of relegating scientific knowledge. They don’t say it’s wrong, as such, they claim it’s just one way of knowing amongst other, equally valid, “ways of knowing”.
This claim is a steaming great big pile of excrement. It’s shit so dense it would put a neutron star to shame.
Science isn’t just some “way of knowing” - it’s the ONLY way of knowing when it comes to the material world.
The process of ‘science’ isn’t without its flaws, of course. It’s done by human beings, and humans are subject to all sorts of flaws and foibles and pressures. Want that big, fat, juicy research grant? Certainly, Sir - just promote the government narrative on covid.
It’s probably very wrong of me to even try to describe science as, in some way, being ‘sacred’. It draws the wrong parallels, perhaps. After all, religious people think their particular niche belief is sacred, too. As Tim Minchin puts it, out of all the hundreds, maybe thousands, of Gods we’ve ever believed in, what’s the chance that you just happen to have stumbled on the correct version?
But, dammit, I can’t help thinking of scientific laws and ideas as being ‘sacred’ in some sense. Newton’s first law of motion can be written as
Every body continues in a state of rest or uniform motion, unless acted upon by a force
It introduces the idea that if we want to change the state of motion of something we must apply a force. We can think of this the other way round too - a force is something that is capable of changing the state of motion of an object. So, it also ‘defines’ what a force is (or at least it defines/characterizes the effect of a force).
It’s hard to describe just how profound and far-reaching this insight of Newton’s is. It allows us to think of the (physical) world in terms of the things that are in it and the forces they exert upon one another. Furthermore, it specifies what happens in the absence of a force. I might write something in the future on just this first law and its implications, but I do worry about putting you all to sleep.
The really important distinction between the ‘sacred’ character of scientific statements and the ‘sacred’ character of religious dogma is that we can test scientific statements. I might get all warm and fuzzy about some ‘sacred’ scientific principle, and that’s OK, but it isn’t enough. Not by a long way.
Science, when pursued in its purest form, is a destroyer of dogma. It’s ‘sacred’ because it’s the only methodology that allows us to slay sacred cows.
In my view, and perhaps it’s too conspiratorial a view, the reason why so many ‘progressives’ attack science is because they, at some level, understand the danger it represents to their worldview. They recognize, at some level, its supremacy as a tool of investigation and understanding. They know their own ideas about the world and how it operates cannot withstand its sacred slingshots - and so they must diminish it somehow. They must profane it.
Fuck ‘em.
Their babbling buffoonery cannot brook the barrage - and, boy, do they know it.
At the end of the day, smearing things is all they have. They liberally smear their shit everywhere - bigot, transphobe, racist, white supremacist, and so on. It’s their only weapon against science. Profaning things is all they do.
My analogy to all this? Throwing out the baby, but keeping some very dirty bathwater and selling it as snake oil. Conversly, just like how babies grow up, slowly, is how science grows up. From simple understandings to more complex ones, and never in a linear progression but rather gaining knowledge here and there through the process, which can never be claimed to be 'done', though this has happened alot lately. Folks that think math is racist might want to avoid houses, cars, roads, eyeglasses and electronics as well, all very racist, all developed with 'math'. On a slightly different topic, understanding WHY the climate models the gov uses are horridly flawed, or WHY the PCR tests are part of the genocide, is very important as well. When bad science is captured and weaponized, it is not science anymore, it is perverted and damaging propaganda. Despite how frustrating it is to have folks reject 'science' out of hand, there are many instances of bad science, non science, dressed as science, being used to kill us. Like now. It's confusing and I can see why this issue is indeed very important to sort out.
Cultures in areas without winter had millennia of a head start on "white males", i.e. europeans and their off-spring nations and peoples.
What they collectively failed to achive from Heron to Hastings, despite having the necessary basic metallurgy, mechanics, and other conditions, the white men and women of Europe did in 500 years.
And that is why they associate science with "white supremacy": they know their ancestors failed to utilise what resources both knowledge- and resource-wise their cutures/peoples/races/pick your poison, and they know that "the white man" didn't and they hate it and cannot ever own up to it.
Heck, look at Sweden! Ain't no-one here going to quibble that we had to hire walloons to help develop the mining industry 450 years ago, or that we had to hire brits to improve shipbuilding and navigators' training or scotsmen for more diverse military experience, or...
And almost no-one swede age 50+ will fail to point out how very well we did to improve on what we bought either. John Ericsson. Gustaf Dalén. Eva de la Gardie. Maria Christina Bruhn. Aina Wifalk. Petra Wadström. Just a handful of names from the 17th/18th century to today. All reaching further due to standing on the shoulders of giants.
Just to get your BP good and boiling:
[https://interfaithsustain.com/returning-to-mt-sinai/]
Under UN leadership, christian churches are joining in with moslem preachers at mt Sinai to continue what is increasingly knowns as "chrislam" (in reality: chritianity's leaders subjugating itself to islam) all in the name of The Science to Save The Climate.
So me and others calling it the Climate Cult, well it's no jape. It's real. It's the Green religion.