A letter Paul wrote to
complain about the "The Dead Sea
Scrolls" exhibition at the Arts House:To Ms. Amira Osman
(Marketing and Communications Manager),cc.Colin Goh, General
Manager,Florence Lee, Depury General ManagerDear Ms.
Osman,I visited the Dead Sea Scrolls “exhibition” today with my wife.
Thinking that it was from a legitimate scholarly institute or (how naïve of me!)
the Israel Antiquities Authority, I was looking forward to a day of education
and entertainment.Yet when I got it, much of the exhibition (and
booklets) merely espouses an evangelical (fundamentalist) view of the Bible –
there are booklets on the inerrancy of the Bible, on how archaeology has proven
the Bible to be true etc.Apart from these there are many blatant
misrepresentations of the state of archaeology and mainstream biblical
scholarship:a) There was initial screening upon entry of a 5-10 minute
pseudo-documentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls. A presenter (can’t remember the
name) was described as a “biblical archaeologist” – a term that no serious
archaeologist working in the Levant would apply to him or herself. (Some prefer
the term “Syro-Palestinian archaeologist” but almost all reject the term
“biblical archaeologist”). See the book by Thomas W. Davis, “Shifting Sands:
The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology”, Oxford, New York 2004. Davis is
an actual archaeologist working in the field and the book tells why the term
“Biblical archaeologist” is not considered a legitimate term by serious
archaeologist.b) In the same presentation, the presenter made the
erroneous statement that the entire old testament was translated into Greek in
the third century BCE. This is a mistake – only the Pentateuch (the first five
books of the Old Testament) was translated during that time. Note that this
‘error’ is not inadvertent but is a familiar claim by evangelical apologists who
try to argue for an early date of all the books of the Old testament - if all
the books have been translated by the third century BCE obviously these books
must all have been written before then! This flies against modern scholarship
which show that some books in the Old Testament such as the Book of Daniel was
written only in the second century BCE]The actual state of scholarship on the
Septuagint [The Greek translation of the Bible] is accurately given in the book
by Ernst Würthwein, “The Text of the Old Testament” – Eerdmans 1988
pp.52-54c) Perhaps the most blatant error was one which claimed that the
“Magdalene fragments” – which contains the 26th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew
is dated to 50 AD!!! Scholars are unanimous in dating these fragments to 200 AD.
The only ‘scholar’ cited that dated these fragments to 50 AD was the German
papyrologist Carsten Thiede – a well know fundamentalist. This is what Burton
Mack (a critical – legitimate – NT scholar) has to say about Thiede’s eccentric
dating “From a critical scholar's point of view, Thiede's proposal is an example
of just how desperate the Christian imagination can become in the quest to argue
for the literal facticity of the Christian gospels” [Mack, Burton L., “Who
Wrote the New Testament?:The Making of the Christian Myth” HarperCollins,
San Francisco 1995] Yet the dating of 50 AD is presented as though it is a
scholarly consensus position!In fact the last point was so blatant that
I confronted the exhibitors. (Tak Boleh Tahan!!) One American exhibitor told me
that “Yes, it could have been worded differently, but then we would have to
change the whole display” (!!). When I told him that this was not a typo but a
blatant attempt to deceive, he mentioned that Theide’s views are supported by
“The Dallas Theological Seminary” – another well know evangelical
institute!I have no issue with the religious strengthening their faith
by having their own internal exhibitions on historical artifacts etc. But when
it is presented to the public as a scholarly exhibition – this is quite close to
being dishonest.I felt cheated of the $36 dollars I paid for the tickets
and of the hour that I spent there before realizing what type of exhibition it
was.I am disappointed with The Art House for show casing this without
warning potential visitors of its clear religious bias.Yours
sincerely,Paul TobinTo their credit, the Arts House speedily
replied.
Balderdash - 0 views
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The issue of truth is indeed so maddening. Certainly, the 'production' of truth has been widely researched and debated by scholars. Spivak for example, argued for the deconstruction by means of questioning the privilege of identity so that someone is believed to have the truth. And along the same line, albeit somewhat misunderstood I feel, It was mentioned in class that somehow people who are oppressed know better.
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ethical porn? - 50 views
I've seen that video recently. Anyway, some points i need to make. 1. different countries have different ages of consent. Does that mean children mature faster in some countries and not in other...
The Inequality That Matters - Tyler Cowen - The American Interest Magazine - 0 views
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most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize.
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In terms of immediate political stability, there is less to the income inequality issue than meets the eye. Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points. First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. To be sure, Gates receives the very best care from the world’s top doctors, but our health outcomes are in the same ballpark. I don’t have a private jet or take luxury vacations, and—I think it is fair to say—my house is much smaller than his. I can’t meet with the world’s elite on demand. Still, by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.
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when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream.
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The Way We Live Now - Metric Mania - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In the realm of public policy, we live in an age of numbers.
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do wehold an outsize belief in our ability to gauge complex phenomena, measure outcomes and come up with compelling numerical evidence? A well-known quotation usually attributed to Einstein is “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” I’d amend it to a less eloquent, more prosaic statement: Unless we know how things are counted, we don’t know if it’s wise to count on the numbers.
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The problem isn’t with statistical tests themselves but with what we do before and after we run them.
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Skepticblog » A Creationist Challenge - 0 views
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The commenter starts with some ad hominems, asserting that my post is biased and emotional. They provide no evidence or argument to support this assertion. And of course they don’t even attempt to counter any of the arguments I laid out. They then follow up with an argument from authority – he can link to a PhD creationist – so there.
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The article that the commenter links to is by Henry M. Morris, founder for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) – a young-earth creationist organization. Morris was (he died in 2006 following a stroke) a PhD – in civil engineering. This point is irrelevant to his actual arguments. I bring it up only to put the commenter’s argument from authority into perspective. No disrespect to engineers – but they are not biologists. They have no expertise relevant to the question of evolution – no more than my MD. So let’s stick to the arguments themselves.
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The article by Morris is an overview of so-called Creation Science, of which Morris was a major architect. The arguments he presents are all old creationist canards, long deconstructed by scientists. In fact I address many of them in my original refutation. Creationists generally are not very original – they recycle old arguments endlessly, regardless of how many times they have been destroyed.
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One of my earlier posts on SkepticBlog was Ten Major Flaws in Evolution: A Refutation, published two years ago. Occasionally a creationist shows up to snipe at the post, like this one:i read this and found it funny. It supposedly gives a scientific refutation, but it is full of more bias than fox news, and a lot of emotion as well.here's a scientific case by an actual scientists, you know, one with a ph. D, and he uses statements by some of your favorite evolutionary scientists to insist evolution doesn't exist.i challenge you to write a refutation on this one.http://www.icr.org/home/resources/resources_tracts_scientificcaseagainstevolution/Challenge accepted.
Open science: a future shaped by shared experience | Education | The Observer - 0 views
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one day he took one of these – finding a mathematical proof about the properties of multidimensional objects – and put his thoughts on his blog. How would other people go about solving this conundrum? Would somebody else have any useful insights? Would mathematicians, notoriously competitive, be prepared to collaborate? "It was an experiment," he admits. "I thought it would be interesting to try."He called it the Polymath Project and it rapidly took on a life of its own. Within days, readers, including high-ranking academics, had chipped in vital pieces of information or new ideas. In just a few weeks, the number of contributors had reached more than 40 and a result was on the horizon. Since then, the joint effort has led to several papers published in journals under the collective pseudonym DHJ Polymath. It was an astonishing and unexpected result.
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"If you set out to solve a problem, there's no guarantee you will succeed," says Gowers. "But different people have different aptitudes and they know different tricks… it turned out their combined efforts can be much quicker."
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There are many interpretations of what open science means, with different motivations across different disciplines. Some are driven by the backlash against corporate-funded science, with its profit-driven research agenda. Others are internet radicals who take the "information wants to be free" slogan literally. Others want to make important discoveries more likely to happen. But for all their differences, the ambition remains roughly the same: to try and revolutionise the way research is performed by unlocking it and making it more public.
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Skepticblog » Reality Check - 0 views
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BECAUSE SCIENCE TELLS US “INCONVENIENT TRUTHS.” If the process of science were all a delusion based on our biases and preconceptions and wishes, it would not give us answers that we don’t like or agree with. Yet scientists often discover things that go against our belief systems, but they must put aside their favorite ideas and face this reality. When Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that the earth (and us) are not in the center of the universe, the idea wasn’t accepted by the Church or the world in general—but it was true. Everyone except a handful of religious nuts and the uneducated now look at the sun “rising” and “setting” and accept the counterintuitive notion that it is the earth turning instead. When Darwin showed that life had evolved and that we are all closely related to other living things, not specially created, it offended many people (and still does)—but its truth was soon acknowledged by the entire scientific community and nearly all educated Westerners who weren’t religiously biased, even before Darwin died. As the web cartoon puts it: “Science: if you ain’t pissing people off, you ain’t doin’ it right”.
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