this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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Russia’s science and higher education ministry has dismissed the head of a prestigious genetics institute who sparked controversy by contending that humans once lived for centuries and that the shorter lives of modern humans are due to their ancestors’ sins, state news agency RIA-Novosti said Thursday.

Although the report did not give a reason for the firing of Alexander Kudryavtsev, the influential Russian Orthodox Church called it religious discrimination.

Kudryavtsev, who headed the Russian Academy of Science’s Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, made a presentation at a conference in 2023 in which he said people had lived for some 900 years prior to the era of the Biblical Flood and that “original, ancestral and personal sins” caused genetic diseases that shortened lifespans.

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[–] [email protected] 79 points 9 months ago (27 children)

It's always confused me how someone that believes in a religion can be a scientist. They directly contradict each other. It just makes it sound like people are in denial.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 9 months ago (5 children)

With all due respect, my friend, you're assuming a false dillema. The majority of academic scientists are religious, reflective of the general population's religious affiliation.

Of course there are a minority of highly vocal outliers on both sides of the spectrum who profit from the discord, real or imagined.

https://sciencereligiondialogue.org/resources/what-do-scientists-believe-religion-among-scientists-and-implications-for-public-perceptions/

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (2 children)

There's a few Neil DeGrasse Tyson clips I remember seeing around about various scientific and religious interactions.

Like he calls nonsense on the BCE/CE vs BC/AD change because scientists, and really most of scociety, operates on the Gregorian Calendar which was created by the Catholic Church under Pope Gregory XIII and is the most accurate calendar we've ever made to account for leap years. Why deny the creators of a fantastic calendar their due respect just because they were religious in a time when everyone was religious?

And in a different he also talked about the Baghdad House of Wisdom and how throughout the Middle Ages of Europe, Baghdad was a center of intellectual thought and culture, until the Fundamentalists got into power and declared manipulating numbers was witchcraft, and ended up being a huge brain drain in Baghdad for centuries.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

NDT is a massive blowhard. I'm not religious but I got turned off by his weird interview with God thing.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

He's one of the profiteers, in my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (2 children)

His point about the change to BCE/CE is the actual nonsense. His point is that we should keep religious terminology being used in science? Out of respect for the creators? When have we ever done that? Science is secular and should be a secular pursuit. Every biologist and anthropologist shouldn’t have to reference Christ just to date their samples even if the calendar is the same. I respect NDT for his work but his awful takes like this hurt what he says often.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Planet names, days of the week, months, which year is zero - even that we have 7 days in the week - All of these are direct religious references that we’re fine with.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Months are actually numbers and politics. For instance, August is named for Augustus Caesar and December basically means 'tenth month.'

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

January is named for Janus, February for a religious feast, March for Mars and June for Juno (Jupiter’s wife). April may also be a goddess Apru but the connection is still not agreed upon.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think the BCE/CE thing is dumb because it's just a religious calendar under a different name. It doesn't change what Year 1 represents anymore than changing the spelling of a word changes its etymology. If we want a secular calendar we should do something like add a few thousand years to count from the founding of the first cities, or have it start in 1945 with the founding of the UN, or even 1970 when Unix time begins. As I see it, calling it the 'common era' does absolutely nothing to divorce the calendar from the birth of Jesus.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Make it 1969 for the moon landing. It would just be slightly off unix time which will annoy low level programmers forever.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (58 children)

Humans are fantastic at compartmentalization

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You can be all sorts of religious and be a scientist.

But the moment you start to claim anything from one of the popular holy books is literally true, you become a massive hypocrite.

But there is no disconnect between deism and science.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Its interesting to see your post to be so controversial. People who thinks all scientists are atheists either just don't know any scientists or never been out in the real world. There's really no difference between scientists and any regular population. I'm a engineer and in my group of about 40 engineers, many of us are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and some Atheists. We don't let religion interfere with our work, and there's no conflicts with each other. We do a mix of R&D in our work, and we build software and hardware that gets used by millions of consumers daily.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I agree with you. I think this is a result of the New Atheist preaching of guys like Dawkins and Hitchens. They're rather crude and provacative in their anti-theism and their followers subsequently have a pretty simplistic view of a complex subject.

Of course, there are even more religious fundamentalists doing exactly the same rabble-rousing. It behooves us to ignore all extremists.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

To an extent it depends how that religion interacts with science. There's quite a few major foundational discoveries that came from priests and ordained clergy from the Catholic Church: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scientists

Within the Catholic Church there are a few orders of clergy dedicated to scientific discovery, especially the Jesuits.

Granted a lot of them conducted science under the broad philosophy of better understanding the universe God created, but if the end result eventually improves the lives of people, I don't see how that's an inherently bad thing.

If we wanted to be a bit more accurate to the hustoru of the real world, religious fundamentalism is opposed to science.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The problem is that some people like this guy are clearly not compartimentalizing at all.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (8 children)

Its definitely not true that science and religion have to contradict each other. Take Christianity—you can easily believe in scientific methods to discover the way the world works, while believing that 'God' is the Creator of those things.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (5 children)

The thing that gets me is this whole god thing has never in hundreds of years shown or done anything of biblical proportions and we are supposed to just believe it? Prove to me it's real. I love how the defense for this is how you need to believe for it to be real but I'm sorry that's not how that works. If you tell me you have a quarter in your pocket I'm but never show me it why would I believe you?

Why should we have to prove nonexistence when they can't prove existence? If there is no proof, I simply can't believe it.

But that's me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Yup. And having a quarter in a pocket is a perfectly reasonable thing that is not only possible, but happens all the time. And even then, there's no real reason to believe it.

Now do the same thing for a claim of the supernatural.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Cognitive Dissonance. I was raised very devout and I did it for years. It doesn't confuse me, it evokes pity. I get to see people making the same fucking mistake I made and it hurts.

I made that mistake, no one else has to. Rip the band-aid off!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

yep, same, for years. you WANT it to be true, so you ignore the contradictions.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Science and religion (in the broad sense, not specific statements of a religion) are just two entirely separate things. Faith by it's definition exists outside anything testable, so it's just not part of science. Here's the one hitch: science does in-fact point to faith. Bare with me here.

We know with whatever certainty anyone would require that the universe is expanding, and that the rate of that expansion is accelerating. We know with certainty that >90% of all that we know is there, just by looking up, is already permanently and irrevocably beyond our grasp. It will all blink out of the night sky, and no interaction will ever be possible.

Future scientists (human, alien, whatever) will look at certain phenomena, the cause of which we today would know to be a specific galaxy, etc, but we would have no way to gather a single shred of evidence. There would be no way, literally none, to ever interreact with those stellar structures.

To these future scientists you would be citing ancient texts and proposing a 100% untestable hypothesis. You would be proposing literal gods outside of the machine. And you'd be right. But it would all have to be taken on faith.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

There's a difference between working with the latest and most probable hypothesis under the assumption that it could be wrong and faith in a religious sense.

Faith and dogma leave no shred of doubt that they're right. Science acknowledges that it could be completely wrong but we have no further data to replace at this point in time.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

They don't necessarily contradict each other (except for fundamentalist).

My understanding of religion is that the religion brings answer to the question "Why ?", the science on the other hand answer the question "How ?"

Science will explain how human life appeared on earth but not why human life appears.

Religion is one way to answer why are we here and should we do with our life. I don't necessarily agree with it but I could understand the appeal for some people.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's more to do with religion falling apart when you apply the scientific method. And if you don't, what kinda scientist are you?

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