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The worst bit is that he sits on the health committee and the science and technology committee...
//http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-28464009
The worst bit is that he sits on the health committee and the science and technology committee...
If Wisdom is the coordination of "knowledge and experience" and its deliberate use to improve well being then how come "Ignorance is bliss"
Good grief. The sooner we are able to sack our MPs, the better! Personally, I'm with Brian Cox & Richard Dawkins where astrology is concerned!:
http://old.richarddawkins.net/articl...gered-by-stars
Oh dear lord....
Society's to blame,
Or possibly Atari.
Read this today, and sighed...
Yeah I heard about this before, I read this title and assumed it was Ellie Golding.
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Staggering, really. What's worse is that from a very quick Google it appears that his ridiculous views have been known for a while now, and he's still holding all of these positions.
Will Astrology give me the lottery numbers?
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'The Fox is cunning and relentless, and has got his Fibre Optic Broadband'
Of course it will. They just might not be this weeks'.Originally Posted by csgohan4
csgohan4 (26-07-2014)
Well, personally I'm of the opinion that appealing to him, as millions do in one flavour or another, makes about as much sense as reading the stars. Or, for that matter, reading tea leaves of pig entrails.
Both, in my opinion, are utter baloney. But .... I can't prove that either one actually is.
I'm as worried, but no more worried, about "leaders" acting on what's written "in the stars" as I am about those acting "because God told me to". Though, in that, the latter kind of zealot may well be a lot more dangerous.
So, I'm kinda left wondering about a society that ridicules reading meaning into celestial bodies, but has a state religion, bishops in Parliament by virtue of them being bishops, welcomes rare visits from the head of one major religion as if his visit were a great honour, and treats the ceremony and rigmarole of the typical Dunday morning ritual cannibalism with great respect and solemnity.
Not getting at anyone here, but society treating astrology with contempt and yet, at the same time, archbishops, cardinals snd Popes with great reverence, courtesy and respect strikes me as hypocrisy of the first order.
Before I start worrying about one fruitcake (IMHO) MP, I'll reserve my worry for a collection of Lords Spiritual.
Well a Church that does not practise what it preaches are hypocrites and no better than politicians. Take the Chancel repair liability and the infamous Wallbank case where they chased a homeowner to help repair a church from an achaeic law. How Christian of them. Article here
Lucky the little unknown bill has been closed off this year.
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'The Fox is cunning and relentless, and has got his Fibre Optic Broadband'
I'm not an Anglican nor a great defender of the official status of the CofE however, I will say that I can see sense in making a distinction between a religion which played a major role in founding/establishing a lot of the laws and culture of the country and a belief which, although very old, has made no such comparable contribution.
I'll also add that perhaps an even closer, more immediate parallel might be drawn between this MP's focus on the zodiac and herbal remedies and the much prescribed treatment, acupuncture. This Guardian article from last year says it's been prescribed by half of Britain's GP's on the NHS.
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Aye. Don't get me started on homeopathy
Society's to blame,
Or possibly Atari.
He's bonkers, but we do need ever more ways for the placebo effect to be enacted. Placebo is safe, effective and cheap so the more of it the better I say!
Well that's the nice thing about science and logic, the burden of proof belongs to the claimant, not the sceptic. Especially for junk like astrology, where the forces involved in orbital mechanics, and energy transfers by bodies are understood by astronomers extremely well.
Yeah, you could do with getting rid of the state religion alright. That said, their influence on government is minimal, diminishing, even, and they've just accepted that their role in government is reducing over time. They couldn't even do a thing to block homosexual equality bills that just kept on passing, much to their chagrin. And at least their imaginary nonsense skirts around the fringes of science, and shift their goalposts around to stay away from science, rather than trample all over it.
Whereas newagey woo-woo is on the march, trying hard to infiltrate government, and jam ineffectual solutions into state policy, as if they were equal to the solutions which actually work, demonstrably so, to the detriment of the tax payer, the patients receiving the non-medicine, the medical treatments developed, the companies and researchers who worked on them, future research funding, etc. is all threatened by this nonsense.
So that's why I would treat astrology/non-medicine/etc. with contempt, and give the CoE a free pass.
Yeah, and that John Barrowman kissing another bloke on TV just as I was enjoying my supper. Couldn't they leave their political statements off the agenda for once or was it all predicted to happen 'in the stars'?
True enough, but I'm reminded of a lesson I learned many (about 50) years ago, from a leading and authoritative source on moral, ethical and philisophical reasoning. That being, Boot, the Dog, in the "Perisher's" cartoon.
See, Boot, and his owners were on a family holiday to the seaside, and Boot, as he did every year, headed for a rock pool inhabited by crabs, to see what the crabs were up to.
Well, the crabs were getting very excited because it was time for their great supernatural event, the annual "eyes in the Sky" .... otherwise known, but not to the crabs, as .... yup, you've got it, Boot.
Well, this year, the crabs have a new leader, a scientist, determined to explore to boundaries of the Pooliverse, to determine the nature of this annual phenomenon. So, he builds the most advanced scientific tool ever seen in the Pooliverse .... a series of connected scrap drinks cans which crab claws have carefully cut the fixed end off, linked together and, when the eyes arrive, is hoist so the end breaks out of the Pooliverse.
Well, Boot is a bit startled, and barks. The bark travels down the can-scope and the air pressure blows the chief scientist-crab clean off the rock he mounted the scope on, leading directly to hysteric reaction from religious crabs, angered because the scientist has angered the "eyes in the sky". So they tear him to pieces.
Boot, meanwhile, wanders off back to join his family's holiday, thinking to himself about how those nutty crabs are geting nuttier every year, blissfully unaware he is now firmly enthroned as God, to the crabs.
The point, clearly, is that the "crabs" are seeking to make sense of their existence, by reference to unexplained events ourside their pooliverse.
Therefore when we, like the crabs, seek to understand things without either the tools to understand what's really going on, or the context imposed by existing in the pooliverse, and being utterly unable to see what's going on outside it, we aren't necessarily going to do better than the crabs.
In a distinctly Rumsfeldian way, we know there are known unknowns, but we can only speculate on the extent, let alone nature, of the unknown unknowns.
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