Re: Christian Images/Pictures

"celia" wrote:

Come out from under the bridge Giles and give a proper reference to
the image.

[me:]
It's the same one both times except that the original one is missing
a "." before "gif" at the end of the URL so I don't think Giles is
trying to deceive anyone here.
...

[Celia:]
What I meant was some historical information on the incident
portrayed.

Oh, I see. I thought you were suggesting that Giles's tiny.cc link
was meant to deceive people into thinking it would be more helpful
than it actually is.

Anyway,
http://staffwww.fullcoll.edu/tmorris/elements_of_ecology/philosophy_science.htm
is what you need, though I'm not sure it's very enlightening. It
seems to be the first page of a set of notes to accompany a book about
ecology, and aimed at motivating students who doubt that being educated
about science is useful. (I don't quite understand why students who
think science education is useless would be doing a course on ecology,
but never mind.) So it argues (kinda) that education and science are
good because they turn people from brutes into decent civilized
folk. Presumably (though they never actually say this) the Spanish
Inquisition was caused by insufficient science education. Or, more
charitably, the scientific attitude of open-minded investigation of
ideas would have made such things less likely. I think either is
rather naive, but perhaps the aim was to provoke the students into
thinking for themselves about science and religion and society and
so on.

By posting such an image without comment Giles is merely choosing a
nag from Jeff's stable of knackered hobby horses and setting it to
limp round the same old course.

No question that Giles's link was unhelpful (though if it had involved
actual eyeball-grabbing it would have been funny as well as revolting).
I still don't understand why a "proper reference" would have made it
any better.

--
Gareth McCaughan
sig under construc


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