Taylor wrote:Ant wrote:
Advance how? Technologically?
In a sense, sure, CS takes us from demons to witch's to UFO's and aliens. and asks how much cultural zeitgeist has changed.
As I've indicated above, there were several factors involved during the witch trials. It wasn't just a matter of religious superstition motivating people to hunt for witches among them in the name of a god.
Religion may have provided
part of the justification, but so can a political ideology be looked to for the justification of heinous acts against people. It is not a unique phenomena to religion. That's false.
What you have here is the promotion of a particular worldview. Naturally, the promoter is going to single out a competing worldview and downplay it with selective cherry-picking, oversimplified historical analysis, and sweeping generalizations.
It seems up to this point what's implicit in Sagan's book is the premise "the only hope we have for rational behavior is to adopt a scientific worldview"
religion has played the most significant role culturally, to date, since the rise of "civilization."
it's counter factual to pretend and question - "what if civilization began with a scientific worldview?"
and there is no evidence that would verify we'd all be better off it had.
science will always be a handmaiden to something. after WWII science immediately became a handmaiden to the industrial military complex.
forget about science and religion. that's not what the real issue is. what about science its ethics?
there was a time in history when natural scientists practiced medical dissections (and other things) on criminals.
that seems very unethical to most people in "modern" times.
what the hell about this?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2015/01/2 ... s-congress
PETA's cause here is supported by me.
look at this from the link:
My position at the speakers' table at the front of the briefing room allowed me to watch audience members' faces as PETA's four-minute video — showing the trauma the experiments induce in the infant monkeys — played. The attendees' intent, distressed expressions will stay with me for a long time — though the sights and sounds of the terrified infant monkeys will stay with me longer.
More and more science is discovering the strong behavioral similarities between humans and monkeys.
Monkeys are known to experience emotion. And yet science continues to subject monkey's to the most traumatic states you can imagine. Most of these experiments go absolutely nowhere.
Meanwhile, we have celebrity scientists (and others) talking about how close we are to monkeys.
I'm guessing science doesn't consider the reverse all that important - how close monkeys are to humans (behavior, social aspects, etc)
I'd like to think two hundred years from now the citizens of that time will look back at our science and say how barbaric a simple a lot of it was.
hopefully that will happen sooner.
Science essentially is working
carte blanche .
'Speciesism' is the idea that being human is a good enough reason for human animals to have greater moral rights than non-human animals. ...a prejudice or bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.
Anthropocentrism (/ˌænθrɵpɵˈsɛntrɪzəm/; from Greek ἄνθρωπος, ánthrōpos, "human being"; and κέντρον, kéntron, "center") is the belief that human beings are the central or most significant species on the planet (in the sense that they are considered to have a moral status ...
And let's not forget that intelligent aliens would send out binary signals that humans would or should be able to detect and decipher. Why? because we are proof of "intelligent" life.
What's alien intelligence? anything that we can understand and attempts communication with us.
What is alien "life"? anything that we would define as life.