Teaching Science Badly – and Well

#210 by tahmed32
[whiile you are right in saying that faith means no questioning - that is true only for faith practiced in traditional religion (never mind the brand name, islam, hinduism whatever)

true faith i think calls for questioning and increasing human knowledge of things (that, per the quran e.g., is the reason God created mankind - i.e. to study creation and learn more about it). ]

Interesting how faith, which is defined by the absence of reasoning, is now categorized into ``false`` and ``true`` faiths.

It`s even more interesting how ``true`` faith just happens to be associated with the quran. :)

#210 by tahmed32

[i will grant you that traditional religion has been pervasive in the past. but that does not mean that your or i are obliged to follow it rather than to use our common sense.]


So, does your common sense say that a man who beheaded 700 UNARMED CIVILIANS and sold their INNOCENT AND HELPLESS women and children into slavery, is a monster?

(Try to answer this one without the usual hissing, spitting and name-calling).

#206 bjkumar: whiile you are right in saying that faith means no questioning - that is true only for faith practiced in traditional religion (never mind the brand name, islam, hinduism whatever)

true faith i think calls for questioning and increasing human knowledge of things (that, per the quran e.g., is the reason God created mankind - i.e. to study creation and learn more about it).

i will grant you that traditional religion has been pervasive in the past. but that does not mean that your or i are obliged to follow it rather than to use our common sense.

#207 yes pewresearch: listen to what monkey man says. he speaks from bitter experience - the only thing pakis feed him is peanuts.

#202 hamidm: wow!! i didnt know there was such a thing as ``spandrelists``, and couldnt even find it in the dictionary. then i googled, and sure enough - i just increased my knowledge to realize that there is a name attached to the thinking you describe. And you provide an eloquent statement on why the role of religion in reducing the stress that accompanies the knowledge of our mortality provides no evolutionary benefit.

While what you say is true, you need to take into account that the role of religion is not limited to reducing stress, i.e.

1. religion provides ``dutch courage`` against external enemies: for millions of years, our ancestors have lived as tribes and fought over limited resources, and thus there is a premium attached to the ``warrior`` behavior in human society. religion provides a form of ``dutch courage`` (the brits claimed the dutch got their courage by going drunk to battle) . this has been an evolutionary plus in past ages - today, when resources are no longer limited thanks to scientific advance, this evolutionary advantage has become a major political problem for human society (in the form for religious terrrorism).

2. religion promotes internal social order by promoting ``moral conduct`` - not coveting the neighbor`s goods, cattle or woman for example. again, this is true for societies where men need the Eternal Carrot and Stick to be goaded into good behavior.

So to summarize - historically religion has in fact served an evolutionary purpose for mankind, contrary to what the spandrelists say.

The real question is: Is religion relevant in the emerging Global Society where competition for scarce resources is being replaced by cooperation for unlimited resources, and where ``moral conduct`` is promoted through emphasis on good values in schools and by an effective law and justice system? And, looking further into the future, will religion still have any value when (as will quite likely happen in the next century or so) humans are able to live indefinitely?

This post is already too long - but the quick answer to these questions in my view is yes.

#203 by PewResearch on March 6, 2007 5:38am PT

you`re wasting your time with prophet tahmed(pbuhsrr)..there are only two kinds of pakis..those who say they support islamic terrorism and liars..

Implicit in every act of faith is the requirement for us to suspend disbelief and to forego questioning.

Human lives and whatever involves even parts of human lives are full of contradictions. Faith does not worry about such contradictions – it only worries about what it represents to itself. Science does not tolerate contradictions well. A scientific mind will attempt to get to the root of such contradictions wherever it notices them – and it will use the tools it has acquired along the way. If the current tools fail, it will attempt to examine those tools, too, improvising newer and better tools for the current “task”. The hope is that as time passes, the tools in its arsenal will be better shaped and can handle not only all the tasks encountered earlier but also the newer ones. Civilizations progress through acquiring such arsenals.

Faith – like stone, stays on its own. It does not change, nor does it desire to. It does not care about the complexity of the next “task” – it has already figured out the one, the only solution for EVERY task, it can bust the task! Simplistic, perhaps so – but it works for many.

The stronger the faith, the more resistant it will be to “resolve” contradictions – except at its own terms in its own “simplistic” ways.

#203 while i am greatly flattered at your great need to engage in india-pakistan mudslinging, as we say in pakistan to the beggar who refuses to take no for an answer, ``baba, jao maaf karo.`` or as dr. phil would say ``if you are a twit, there will caansequences whereby people will refuse to waste time with you even if they have plenty of time to waste.``

#201 shabha: If there was a demand for teaching in panjabi or other ``regional languages`` in primary schools, by now there would have been ``panjabi medium`` or ``pushto medium`` schools. With the realization that education is the ticket to a better life for their children now widespread in Pakistan even in the most remote areas (as I am told by people who run ngo-funded schools in rural areas), the demand for schooling is greater than the supply.

So, while in theory it may seem to make life easier for the child to get him/her started in the language he/she knows, in practice it seems that parents are willing to forego this convenience for the benefits of getting a leg up as early as possible in the language they will need to compete for jobs, business and (in case of the lucky few) admission to colleges later on.

Regards.

Re: # 197 Tahmed32
``i told you on the other board that i have wasted enough time with you...who think anyone who disagrees with them is a hypocrite etc``

There you go again!

It is not a question of `disagreement` alone as you disingenuously allude to, but rather a failure on your part to clarify your position on the issue of `defending General-President Musharraf with a call to arms when your country`s neighbors threaten to pay back in kind when he sends murderous agents to their civilian centers, but express no such calls to action when he engages in such provocative acts in the first place` that I raised in #177. That is especially galling when you claim to have been raised with `honesty` and other such vacuous `virtuous` claims in your numerous posts.

I suspect that the reason that you consider this a `waste` of time has nothing to do with time (since your million plus posts on Chowk do not amount to any more than a waste of time!) but more with the fact that you are unable to defend your contradictory positions adequately and would rather slide away with your tail between your legs rather than defend yourself openly on Chowk. You are nothing but a run of the mill, self-righteous, patronizing hypocrite!

Re: # 200

tahmed,

............ just accept the fact that you came nothing, never amounted to anything and will end up as nothing (sounds like the definition of god?)............ you do that and you won`t need a god to lean on .......... here is an excerpt from sunday`s paper :

``Fear of death is an undercurrent of belief. The spirits of dead ancestors, ghosts, immortal deities, heaven and hell, the everlasting soul: the notion of spiritual existence after death is at the heart of almost every religion. According to some adaptationists, this is part of religion’s role, to help humans deal with the grim certainty of death. Believing in God and the afterlife, they say, is how we make sense of the brevity of our time on earth, how we give meaning to this brutish and short existence. Religion can offer solace to the bereaved and comfort to the frightened.

But the spandrelists counter that saying these beliefs are consolation does not mean they offered an adaptive advantage to our ancestors. “The human mind does not produce adequate comforting delusions against all situations of stress or fear,” wrote Pascal Boyer, a leading byproduct theorist, in “Religion Explained,” which came out a year before Atran’s book. “Indeed, any organism that was prone to such delusions would not survive long.”

Whether or not it is adaptive, belief in the afterlife gains power in two ways: from the intensity with which people wish it to be true and from the confirmation it seems to get from the real world. This brings us back to folkpsychology. We try to make sense of other people partly by imagining what it is like to be them, an adaptive trait that allowed our ancestors to outwit potential enemies. But when we think about being dead, we run into a cognitive wall. How can we possibly think about not thinking? “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it,” the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in “Tragic Sense of Life.” “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.”

Re: # 135

i was talking about the mother tongue as medium of instruction at the primary level alongwith an independent subject of english. i think the basics of every subject for teaching at primary level can easily be available in punjabi... when the students become able to understand english then offcourse it is preferable to teach them in english as u have rightly pointed out the importance of english as to its universality and richiness. This is the only way the students can start learning and understanding the subjects taught to them right from the start of their educational career.

regards.

#195 hamidm: you will agree, i hope, that there is nothing wrong in seeking peace of mind (including awareness of our own limited existence) through belief in God. You will agree I hope that there is much more to things than what we see in everyday life (there is a universe in a drop of water, as they say) - and so it takes no great stretch of imagination to believe that human consciousness is not the only consciousness there is.

While I think that anyone who needs the Eternal Carrot and Stick to prod him to do the right thing leads an existence no better than a dangar (the panjabi kind), I also think that that of itself does not mean belief in God is held only by dummies.

#198 If I understand you correctly, the prod to doing the right thing is one`s own conscience. rather than the Eternal Carrot and Stick (heaven and hell). But does one need to believe in the Supremo Numero Uno in order to do the right thing? And what does that make of religion?

heavy stuff, I agree. But lighter than what I was just struggling with workwise just now. :-)

#192 & #193 by tahmed32

If I understand it correctly by prod you are implying jazaa and sazaa. No, not at all! I believe virtue to be its own reward. But again at the risk of repeating myself, it is the subtlety of the human condition e.g for me I get lazy and take short cuts when I know what the right thing to do is; so the gentle prod to me is … hey you know better then to do that. But you may never take short cuts but have other issues, so the prod is directed in other ways for you. It is unique and tailor made for each one of us because we all have our own individual and unique paths to God.

This is getting too darn heavy! I think I am gonna have a head ache – this is way beyond I ever wanted to delve.

#194 i told you on the other board that i have wasted enough time with you. you are welcome to join the ranks of masadi and other geniuses on chowk who think anyone who disagrees with them is a hypocrite etc.