From: crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass)
Subject: Re: Religion & Physics Don't Mix
Organization: University of Virginia
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 22:08:39 GMT

In article <1ebiveINNt95@chnews.intel.com> bhoughto@sedona.intel.com (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
>In article <1992Nov17.032437.2544@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:
>>     Madness is also in the eye of the beholder.
>
>A disingenuous and logically bereft statement, at best.

     Apparently you believe it is true since you do not seem to
     have taken my bet that the majority of the first ten psychaiatrists
     I asked would not share your definition of psychosis.
     
>>One civilization spent
>>     at least 40 years piling huge blocks atop one another in the largest
>>     manmade rockpile on the planet simply to produce a place to bury a 
>>     king.
>
>20 years, 2 million blocks, and it was a public-works
>project that provided a damping of economic variation
>during the periodic lulls in the continuous rotation of
>the dozens of crops grown in the Nile floodplains.
>
>Imhotep invented workfare.

     Hogwash.   Show me documentary evidence that a) it took 20 years
     b) it was a 'public works' project of the nature of 'workfare'.
     I'd even be satisfied with good numbers on the number of
     people required to construct it.  You have them cutting, moving and
     placing nearly 300 blocks a day, every day for 20 years.
     That there hole is quite a ways from that there rock pile by
     foot.  A

     Apparently you have not heard of the rather common practice of
     appropriating the work of previous rulers as one's own.

     By the way, by my definition, such work programs are insanty.  And yet...

>>A group of tribes spent untold millenia guarding a small box of
>>     religious artifacts, often at the expense of large numbers of their
>>     people, their homes and their lives.  This is sheer madness, but
>>     these efforts provided cohesion in their societies.  Also, if they 
>>     hadn't done such stuff, how much would we know of them?
>
>How much do we care?  They sound insane, and probably
>were.  I expect we'd infer a great deal more than the
>truths behind the contents of their little box of relics.

     Madness is in the eye of the beholder.  Parts of their society
     remain today while the competing societies have vanished.

>>     It is inappropriate to judge theology by the rules of science.
>
>Only to a twit.

     More of that vaunted logic?  I'm impressed.

     "... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of
     a personal God is a childlike one.  You may call me an agnostic,
     but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional 
     atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation
     from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.
     I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness
     of our intellectual understanding of nature and our own
     being."
                              Albert Einstein (1949)

     Apparently there are many of us twits who have the wisdom to realize
     that there are things outside of science, and that outside, we have
     only opinions.

                    dale "Twits R' Us" bass



-- 
C. R. Bass                                          crb7q@virginia.edu        
Department of Mechanical, 
     Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering
University of Virginia                              (804) 924-7926
Newsgroups: sci.physics