How reliable is science? --Anthropology (The limitations of science)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, April 16, 2012, 00:35 (4384 days ago) @ David Turell


> > > I'll grant you the pride/ego part in ivory towers but we are talking about business-driven cancer research. These folks with Ph.D.s are on hire to produce money-making drugs. And they are paid well. Money will always beat pride as a force.
> > 
> > Really?
> > 
> > http://russianow.washingtonpost.com/2010/07/the-man-who-refused-a-million-dollars.php&a... 
> I know the Perelman story. One snowflake does not make a snow storm. Most people are as I have described. Why do religions accept as a fact that we are all sinners who have to admit it and have to be changed?-Buddhism doesn't admit anything of the sort. Neither does Taoism or Hinduism. It's something unique to the Abrahamic faiths, and Zoroastrianism. In these religions there is a general consensus that man is fundamentally evil. This is false: Humanity is neither good nor evil. We have the capacity to serve ourselves or to serve others. "Good" and "evil" are arbitrary judgments. -We DO however have an obvious tendency to be self-absorbed. This is intensely reinforced in all material cultures, as we place a great focus on the acquisition of wealth. Insomuch as there is a common thread among religions, there will be an agreement that we need to work to think more of others. Empathy is the key skill that needs to be fostered. All religions (save for the LHP religions I mentioned previously) do promote an altruism of some sort as an ideal state. -My point bringing up Perelman had more to do with trying to point out the long chain of mathematicians going back to pythagoras that eschewed wealth for knowledge. -I'm fully aware that most people would see no harm in taking the money, but in math, we are a very prideful lot. -My goal is to keep you from trying to paint everything with the same brush. In mathematics, a single contra case disproves a general claim. -Still, you haven't demonstrated any real opposition to the idea that when the cards are all on the table, that the truth has always prevailed, money or not.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"