Modern Discrimination: Comparing to Salem Witch Trials

[Dooh]

What kinda modern discrimination is similar and can be compared to the Salems Witch Trial?

 

[selfAdjoint]

The holocaust? Mao's great leap forward?

 

[Dooh]

i meant modern as in today's world. i really can't find any discrimination that relates to the salems witch trial

 

[GroupCaptainMandrake]

"Intelligent Design" in Schools

I was considering a story about the push for "intelligent design" theory in schools. Here in WV, we're up to our poor necks in science-trumping superstition. My thoughts led to the following essay: Hope y'all don't mind.

I do a little radio show and tend to favor reason over superstition. In WV no less! I've been damned to Hell by the fundies on-air more times than I can count. But I wanted some rational response. Thanks. Sorry for the length.

"When the “Creationists” argue their “7 Days + 2 Humans = A Planet Gone To Hell In An Apple Cart” theory, isn’t it really just racist code? Doesn’t the Pentateuch set up a fundamentally racist cosmology in which societies and people are stratified as superior and inferior, i.e. lesser races being the product of incest and rape while the racially pure Children of Noah go on to become the Children of Israel and by Pauline extension, the White People? And when largely white organizations preach the necessity of teaching a “faith” like “intelligent design” (and it’s far more faith than science), aren’t they really merely justifying their ongoing racehate with a casual thump
on the Bible?

Isn’t there a much more compelling case in the modern era for the equality of human kind? Didn’t we cast this stupid religio-eugenics into history’s garbage grinder at the end of World War II?

Apparently, we didn’t. For “Christian Schools” are springing up like vile weeds in the garden of knowledge all over this country. And impressionable little children are indoctrinated, not taught, mind you, but indoctrinated, that to suggest the evolutionary travel of the primates is “only a theory,” while the creation myth of a people five thousand years removed from rational thought is taught as “fact” is co-equal education. The State of Georgia, which should probably change its name to the “State of Ignorance,” requires a sticker on its science books to the effect that evolution is “only a theory.” Yet they offer no such sticker for the fact that fundamentalist religion is “only mythology.”

For you see, in science, there is a rigorous level of proof required for a theory to become not FACT, but LAW. TO become LAW, a theory must, in EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE, be verifiable in the same degree with the same outcome. Thus, it will always remain “Darwin’s Theory” and not “Darwin’s Law;” for while rates of change may be quantified, as well as degree, the precise, fundamental nature of the change may not. Thus, Boyle was able to establish LAWS that determine the manner in which gases behave, but our attempts to guess which way the influenza virus will next evolve is a matter not of divine intervention and miracle, but of the educated hypothesizing of some intrepid and incredibly curious scientists. And the phrase “thus did then a miracle occur” is strikingly absent in the lexicon of modern science. Not even Thales of Miletus as he first contemplated the possibility of the atom indulged in the religious hooey of his day.

And the most ironic, hilarious form of the dichotomy of mind and superstition is the farmer who will spit the ambeer and declare “Well I ain’t related to no damned monkey,” flicking away a fly while he fills the tank of his sprayer with the latest variation of deadly poison to kill the latest evolutionary edition of the pests that have developed a taste for Ortho’s last vintage.

Science is a lot smaller bite than “Created He the flea, she and he, to torment you and me and Fido makes three.” That’s a gulp to gag a whale, used as it is to taking things at a gulp in the first place, Jonah notwithstanding. (“Now, Bob, it doesn’t say “whale,” it says “big fish.” Whoa! Who are you, Jonah’s miraculous 21st Century transcriptionist?)

Tell me: if you work with electricity, and you wire up a socket and it provides juice to your favorite radio, is it a miracle? Now, in a spirit of fairness, I’ll admit that if I did it, it WOULD be a miracle. But for people who know what they’re doing? Is it a miracle, or further proof of the quantifiable, qualifiable, verifiable laws by which electricity behaves? If you hire a plumber, do
you want one who’s faith-based or one who’s been taught and trained over the years by a master plumber to KNOW, not PRAY FOR, but DAMNED-WELL KNOW where the poop’s going to go when you flush? And a stopped-up toilet needs a plumber, not an evangelist! But not in the Religion Industry! Gotta wonder: does Jerry Falwell reach for the plunger or lay hands on the
offending effluvium in hopes of casting it out? Answer: neither. He gets the hired help to do the “laying on of hands.” And prays for their success. And fire’s 'em if they fail.

But back to the children. Pity them. Pity those little children. Pity them! For their parents and, more importantly, the religious cultists who pretend to educate them are at the very least dooming them to climbing an intellectual hill steeper than it need be and damning them to a lifetime of ignorance and superstition at worst. These poor children have to twist their intellects to believe in magic at the cost of their intensely rational little minds at a time when all about them is quantifiable and qualifiable and verifiable. Sugar is sweet. Not a miracle. Fire burns. Not a direct and proximate result of the original sin of Eve. Water is wet and good, and a bath is fun. Not a ritual ablution to keep the boogie-man away.

At the same time that toddlers learn that pee-pee goes in the potty and that hot liquids “burn the baby, burn, no!” they’re being handed an absolute affront to the natural world they see, feel, touch, taste all around them in the form of 5,000 year-old myths of cosmogeny. We, even the best-intentioned among us, give them Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the world to which
they’re fresh and new as nothing more than a 7-Day Playdoh session executed by a really big, mean powerful baby, and we do it to them all in one big, gulp.

It is a testament to the child that they will swallow it all without gagging and, moreover, without saying “Aw, Dad. Quit it. I’m a big boy now”. It is a testament to the child’s native ability to trust and and to dissemble that they will joyfully let us lie to them in such fashion, knowing innately that it’s in their best interest to do so.

It’s really no different from the schoolyard dealer: “The first one’s free, baby. After that ya’ got to pay.” And the erstwhile “students” of the “Christian Schools,” no let’s get a more honest turn of phrase here, “the Religion Industry Schools,” pay and pay and pay over the course of this, the
only life they will ever know, ever have. They “learn” the depth of sin before ever they can commit it; learn to hate themselves at the same time love’s trying to take hold in their little hearts. And, in the end, hearts are a place for love, not hate. Right?

Not in the “Religion Industry.” Hate and bloody death is for the Children of Ham; for the Moabites born of the incest of Lot and his daughter, and for the scientists who make mockery of their superstition.

“Suffer the little children, indeed!”

Mysticism’s a matter for the heart, and not mind-candy.

Again: THIS AIN’T DRESS REHEARSAL and the lecture to Job was a cop-out!

Sorry for the diatribe. Hope y'all didn't mind.

Peace.