re: #40 wheat-dogghazi

Since you have a background in physics you’ll appreciate this:

The problem with so much of the exercise of sitting in the pew and being indoctrinated is not just the “facts” that are alleged - such as Adam, Eve, Noah, and so forth. We learn more than facts - we learn thinking processes too. Creationists teaching children about Adam and Eve are not just teaching about Adam and Eve, but also mentoring their students in how to approach life, in this case by not questioning authority.

As a physics professor used to tell me, he was there not to teach us facts but to teach us how to think.

Sitting in a pew and being indoctrinated is a way of shaping thought, to make the paradigm of authority ➯ truth take root in the young mind, and through repetition over decades to make it the central process in the fundamentalist way of looking at all of life.

However, modern society has been built from the expansion of human knowledge, and this resulted from questioning in new ways old beliefs. Knowing how to formulate a new question, how to examine a previously stated “fact” to discover some new element that may disprove it, or which uncovers new data, is at the heart of science and the modern world. This was not unique to the early heralds of modernity in the West (e.g., Copernicus, Galileo) but the explosion of this way of looking at the world certainly in that time in Europe was the big turning point to get us to where we are today.

This is the war of the worldviews in which we are now engaged.