It's Not Round!

[onefixedstar]

A friend told me a few months ago that I'd really like Skeptic; I begin to think he's right.

The IR theory

Comments

[mrthursday.livejournal.com]

Skeptic is a wonderful magazine (and hard to get hold of over here!). Except...

A lot of modern "skeptics" are very cruel, morally supperior, intellectually vain and sometimes just plain wrong. In this catorgory I place such lumminaries of the "movement" such as James "the Amazing" Randi, Richard Dawkins and Dr James Alcock (who just seems to have a paranoid fear of Religion in all it's forms). These people ethier mis-understand science as much as there opponents do (the most pointless fist fight in the world? Flat earthers V Hollow earthers!), patronise or fail to understand that just because someone is religious it dosn't mean they are unaware of science. Well they seem that way to me.

My idea of a good skeptic is the late Carl Sagan. His book The Demon Haunted World is to my mind the most wonderful tome ever written on popular science, what science is and is not and (importantly) it's limits. He had a degree of compassion, patience and tolerance his rather fanatical colleagues seemed to lack.

I stop myself here because I'll rant. It's just one of those areas I feel strongly about.

[onefixedstar.livejournal.com]

I haven't read enough of the work of those you name to agree or disagree with you, but I think those of us fortunate enough to live in places where religion does not dictate law often fail to appreciate just how hard the battle can be for Americans who would rather maintain the separation of Church and State as a reality. I don't mean to justify any cruelty or lack of compassion on their part, just to suggest that living in a country where evolution is still regularly outlawed from school curriculums or kept only with a fight, the Religious Right manages to persuade the American government to stop contributing to the UN Population Fund, and a gay man faces an easier time getting elected to public office than an atheist, might tend to make one a bit defensive at times. Yes, tolerance would be a better and more effective approach, but tolerance is difficult to maintain when it always seems to go one way.

[mrthursday.livejournal.com]

Well Dawkins is an Englishman and teaches here, so what is his excuse?
They anoy me so much, these peope because Science is so important (even to those of us with faith), but these people demean it with such poor arguments. I think they do more harm than good in the battle against Intelligent design for example by becoming such gross charactures. They make it easy for the religous right!