Post by rmarks1 on Feb 14, 2019 0:04:54 GMT -5
To return to medicine for a moment, just listen to Dr. Gerald Weissmann, a professor of medicine at New York University. In an article called 'Sucking with the Vampires: The Medicine of Unreason" he writes, "We are told frequently nowadays that the expensive, autocratic medical science of our day has substituted its own elite values for those that would better serve one or another subcultures.
It seems to me that I have heard that song before. It's from an old familiar score. Dr. Karl Gebhard, Supreme Clinician to the SS, told the Nuremberg Tribunal that `What the National Socialists wanted was to introduce a popular medicine; they had little regard for scientific medicine. All sorts of popular drugs that were not approved by the medical profession allegedly because we did not understand them or were too conceited or were financially interested in the suppression of them, were used in concentration camps... The source of these [so-called] experiments was Himmler's conception of medicine as pure mysticism." ...
Examples of the same type of thinking abound in all levels of education today. A worrying complaint is beginning to surface from science teachers and policy analysts in the Northwest Territories and other places where there are schools with large aboriginal populations. Teachers and administrators are being required to accept and teach numerous shamanistic mythologies bundled together under the rubric of "aboriginal spirituality". And these are being taught -- not in after-school religious instruction nor in a comparative religion class, but as a form of knowledge of equal validity to the findings of science.
This is scarcely surprising, considering that the same kind of thing has been occurring in Native Colleges and teacher-training programs within Canadian universities for two decades now. I remember hearing drums beating all day long from the classrooms at UBC where Native students were supposedly learning to be teachers -- and being rebuffed by my colleagues for daring to question this. What is novel in this case, however, is that a courageous spokesperson in the territorial Department of Resources (who was promptly fired for her candor) has gone public about it. She said that teachers and administrators are at a loss to understand how such a policy can result in anything other than "religious propaganda masquerading as knowledge".
We already know all about the attacks on Darwinian evolution within the university setting. Creation Science is being taught in increasing numbers of biology departments as an appropriate alternative to Darwinian theory. Scientific knowledge, it now seems, is a matter of preference. But more than anything, I believe that it is the misunderstandings and deliberate distortions of chaos theory that now pose the greatest risk to the teaching of an authentic scientific orientation to students. Chaos theory has been wrenched from its limited and useful meaning in particle physics and twisted to provide justification for a belief that the "essence" of reality is actually a chaotic aggregation under the arbitrary rule of some sort of life force -- usually represented by Gaia. Each infinitesimal particle, it is said by these believers, is bursting with imminent vitalism -- and even more, with a consciousness far superseding that produced by the living brain.
This is tied in with a grab bag of philosophical perspectives referred to variously by their followers as "deconstructivism", "social constructivism", "perspectivism", "eco-feminism" or "goddess feminism", and "Afro-centrism". All are based on epistemological relativism and its corollary -- cultural relativism. All are expressions of a belief in the essential subjectivism and cultural specificity of human knowledge and values, and in the reducibility of all aspects of the human condition to the pursuit of power. "Postmodernism" sometimes serves as a collective term to bundle all these models together, for critics and supporters alike. However, as the philosopher of science, Mario Bunge of McGill has said, the popular "postmodernism" designation is itself an oxymoron -- superbly befitting of the irrationalism of its components.
www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/wiki/postmodernism
It seems to me that I have heard that song before. It's from an old familiar score. Dr. Karl Gebhard, Supreme Clinician to the SS, told the Nuremberg Tribunal that `What the National Socialists wanted was to introduce a popular medicine; they had little regard for scientific medicine. All sorts of popular drugs that were not approved by the medical profession allegedly because we did not understand them or were too conceited or were financially interested in the suppression of them, were used in concentration camps... The source of these [so-called] experiments was Himmler's conception of medicine as pure mysticism." ...
Examples of the same type of thinking abound in all levels of education today. A worrying complaint is beginning to surface from science teachers and policy analysts in the Northwest Territories and other places where there are schools with large aboriginal populations. Teachers and administrators are being required to accept and teach numerous shamanistic mythologies bundled together under the rubric of "aboriginal spirituality". And these are being taught -- not in after-school religious instruction nor in a comparative religion class, but as a form of knowledge of equal validity to the findings of science.
This is scarcely surprising, considering that the same kind of thing has been occurring in Native Colleges and teacher-training programs within Canadian universities for two decades now. I remember hearing drums beating all day long from the classrooms at UBC where Native students were supposedly learning to be teachers -- and being rebuffed by my colleagues for daring to question this. What is novel in this case, however, is that a courageous spokesperson in the territorial Department of Resources (who was promptly fired for her candor) has gone public about it. She said that teachers and administrators are at a loss to understand how such a policy can result in anything other than "religious propaganda masquerading as knowledge".
We already know all about the attacks on Darwinian evolution within the university setting. Creation Science is being taught in increasing numbers of biology departments as an appropriate alternative to Darwinian theory. Scientific knowledge, it now seems, is a matter of preference. But more than anything, I believe that it is the misunderstandings and deliberate distortions of chaos theory that now pose the greatest risk to the teaching of an authentic scientific orientation to students. Chaos theory has been wrenched from its limited and useful meaning in particle physics and twisted to provide justification for a belief that the "essence" of reality is actually a chaotic aggregation under the arbitrary rule of some sort of life force -- usually represented by Gaia. Each infinitesimal particle, it is said by these believers, is bursting with imminent vitalism -- and even more, with a consciousness far superseding that produced by the living brain.
This is tied in with a grab bag of philosophical perspectives referred to variously by their followers as "deconstructivism", "social constructivism", "perspectivism", "eco-feminism" or "goddess feminism", and "Afro-centrism". All are based on epistemological relativism and its corollary -- cultural relativism. All are expressions of a belief in the essential subjectivism and cultural specificity of human knowledge and values, and in the reducibility of all aspects of the human condition to the pursuit of power. "Postmodernism" sometimes serves as a collective term to bundle all these models together, for critics and supporters alike. However, as the philosopher of science, Mario Bunge of McGill has said, the popular "postmodernism" designation is itself an oxymoron -- superbly befitting of the irrationalism of its components.
www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/wiki/postmodernism
Bob
