Quote from: LifeReloadedXL on August 05, 2012, 05:03 amDealing with the crazies is a difficult problem as it is, especially when they are affecting the spread of empirical science. Religious special interest groups have grown considerably in the USA. We have parents not vaccinating their children because of unproven information, politicians spouting nonsense that global warming is a hoax, or how people like Michelle Bachman want schools to teach Intelligent design, which is an insult to the intellect. Dawkins is simply illustrating, albeit arrogantly at times, the dangers that politics and religion has on science. His documentary, The Enemies of Reason, eloquently demonstrates that premise. We need people critics like Dawkins to accentuate the hypocrisy of religion, especially after the horrifying events of 9/11. One of the reasons why people don't accept evolution is because they don't understand it, which alludes to what you were saying about the importance of explaining scientific terms to the general public. We need teachers, especially in middle and high school, who are competent in teaching science. Studies have suggested that a notable number of science teachers don't even have a background in science, particularly in schools of high need. A new age Carl Sagan wouldn't be a bad idea either.I think the hypocrisy of religion is evident to anybody who's simply ever thought about the subject, I would again emphasize that you can't get anybody onto your side by telling them that they are wrong. Education is the key. Yes. But maybe not the kind that gets taught I think.Because I didn't learn about evolution from high school. I learned it by reading the Origin of Species myself. The biology textbook was ok, but nothing inspiring. To see it through the eyes of the author at that revolutionary moment it crystallized into a greater awareness of reality, that is the key. That is true learning. If anything some of my teachers greatly retarded my educational progress by making fantastic subjects incredibly boring. Lucky I got out alive!I also am not so sure that having teachers with a background in science is the real problem here. I think the real problem here is enthusiasm for the subject. All the good teachers I have known didn't necessarily have degrees, some did, some didn't, but the key thing that united them was a passion for the subject they taught. That's not something you can teach. You either have it or you don't. And if you don't, I don't care if you have a PhD because you'll make a crap teacher.Similarly, I didn't need education from a TV show or documentary to make me think religion was riddled with contradictory thought and hypocrisy. That occurred to me through self learning, from reading books. It's a very rare fundamentalist today who is also an avid reader of books. If they do, they are generally the more sophisticated type of Christian or Muslim I don't have a problem with as a believer, because they wound up coming to similar conclusions about the basic order of things and support pro-western ideals and adopt a big picture view which is highly unlikely to lead to them becoming suicide bombers.American secondary schools are shit. That's what it is. They just are. Improving biology lessons is worthless when the entire school system is corrupted from head to toe. Your innovations would be poisoned by the system's dislike of natural selection (ha! so ironic!) to promote the good teachers and expel the bad, not to mention rampant grade inflation.--Finally, I don't accept conventional opinion on the idea of Climate Change/Global Warming either. That doesn't make me a fool, it makes me somebody who finds it bizarrely convenient that all left wing ideals are apparently borne out by this one concept. Science is never so bipartisan. So something is up and people are right to intuit that this is highly suspect even if they don't have the apparatus to investigate by themselves.That is not to say global warming can't be a real thing, this is a definite possibility. It is just that such a heavy bias to left wing and also very centrally controlled *solutions* to this issue naturally produces a healthy suspicion. Older people are not idiots. It is not just some fundamentalist Christians who think it's weird. Plenty of atheists and agnostics do as well, especially the older ones. Many left wingers of the more libertarian variety also are creeped out by the state oriented perspective of fantastical organizations like the IPCC.This is because all those people, they remember how the idea of Communism spread. It was the more "scientific" method to producing economic results. It was complete bullshit and every single piece of data regarding it in the West for decades was completely doctored and misinterpreted right up until the Berlin Wall fell. Those useful idiots, those western pro-communism intellectuals ought to have been strung up onto lampposts for the lies they spread about that horrifically cancerous ideology. I have only respect for left winger libertarian types like George Orwell who saw the true shape of it, he was a good man, the rest propagated group-think believing there was a scientific consensus behind state communism's rise instead of pure murder.Conservatism exists for a real reason. I'm not even a conservative myself, but they are not morons for disagreeing with this "scientific consensus". The very concept of scientific consensus is a rather peculiar one. While it is true that many scientists are left wing, the best ones I know personally are libertarians or generally tilt to the right. They don't represent a majority, but they exert a unusual degree of influence over their respective fields, most especially in the hard sciences. That's the way right wing brains tend to be wired.I say we wait until all the evidence is in, and that could be slow and take many decades. And don't throw the doctrine of the precautionary principal about, I consider that about as scientific as Pascal's Wager, which is in fact exactly what it is the logical equivalent of. People who say they appreciate science ought to lash themselves for adopting that idea.Science works slowly in an evolutionary way to gather evidence, I'm not panicking about the melt rate of glaciers when the majority of pro global warming proponents I've talked to also think if the North Pole melted in its entirety that sea levels would rise dramatically. I mean. Wat. Scientific illiteracy and a great lack of interdisciplinary thinking abounds on both sides of the argument in my view (I essentially concur with Freeman Dyson's views).