GregD wrote:sarge wrote:Well, here's a more precise definition then:
The Democrat Party, particularly the far Left Wing, is using "science" as a cudgle against people of Faith and to further leftist political objectives and the media, for the most part, cooperates with them.
From GMO, to Fracking, to MMGW (or AGW if you prefer), to anti-vax, there's a current running through that entire side of the political spectrum
that seeks to demonize and marginalize their politcal opposition by casting them as ignorant anti-science troglodytes.
In short, science is being perverted by politics and seems helpless, or unwilling, to prevent it.
And similar tactics are employed by factions with other political persuasions. The name calling and related behaviors are nothing but bullying.
Your example set is incoherent. Science and "the left" agree on some of the topics you list and disagree on others.
With regard to "people of Faith" the enemy isn't the Democrats or lefties because they are also largely "people of Faith". Religious lefties may preach a different dogma than religious righties but they are equally passionate about their religiousness. The sole enemy of religion is science. The foundation of science is the rejection of religious belief as evidence of truthfulness. Science
IS anti-religion. By definition. Whether a "person of Faith" is ant-science depends entirely on the person's concept of religion; if the person rejects scientific evidence based on religious belief then that person is very much anti-science. By definition.
But which scientific evidence are you talking about when you say that? Your data set is incoherent. Science changes through the decades, and what was unquestioned science 50, 100 or 300 years ago becomes very much questioned today if not outright ridiculed. If 150 years ago the religious person believed the Sun had an ORBIT through the far away heavens because the Psalmst said so, but if science did not believe that at the time, then the Christian might have been anti-science back then, but now it turns out they are in full agreement. Science was wrong(science was anti-science?), not the Bible. Correct?
If the Christian believed that you should always wash your hands after touching anything unclean(such as a sick person or dead human or animal found dead) because the Laws of Moses said so, and that certain unclean objects should be burned in the fire(sterilization) but the doctors(medical science) at the time of Semmelwise(late 1800s) furiously rejected such a concept in multiple European countries, punishing/persecuting the upstart Semmelwise, then the believer(along with Semmelwise) was anti science then, but turned out to be pro science say 50 years later when science finally caught up and admitted Semmelwise was right all along. Turns out the anti-science ones ( i.e. anti true science) were the so called scientists. However, even though they later admitted they were wrong- or more likely just acted like they knew it was good to wash your hands all along- probably most of them never had a clue the Bible even contained these statements, laws, commands by which God said He would heal His people from the diseases of the Egyptians, and which were scientifically correct. Too bad, for millions of people, they did not know these laws and accept them sooner.
You say "The foundation of science is the rejection of religious belief as evidence of truthfulness.", but you are wrong to use foundation, as many of the first scientists were pretty strong Christians who only wanted to explain how God's world worked, not disprove His Word. But, if it is NOW The desire of science to reject religious belief as evidence of truthfulness, then poor old science has failed miserably on several occasions, has it not? But, science has often gone a long, long time before the evidence arrives showing how wrong it was all along.
I have been dealing with this in medical science for much of my career. For example, look at dietary advice. This speaks to the political and economic influence on science, or at least scientists, mentioned earlier. Do you remember how medical authorities( aka scientists) allied with our government and agriculture(USDA) to brow beat the public and businesses like McDonalds to replace saturated fats with vegetable fats and butter with margarine, which meant replacing with trans-fats? Liquid vegetable oil altered by science to look like butter, aka margarine? And do you know NOW that there is no telling how many they killed with that advice? Turns out the trans-fats were far more harmful than the natural fats- saturated or otherwise. Now we never heard an apology for that gross malpractice fully backed by science and government working together, did we? All that happened was the commercials and government advice to replace butter and animal fat with margarine more or less ceased. But the products are still on the shelf! Trans-fat free now, but still oils that turn into trans-fat when heated.
Or how about the low fat/high carb(as in bread/pasta etc) recommendations as being good for your over all health and especially heart health, resulting in an epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes? ow, finally, the science in steadily proving this to be just the opposite of what we should hav been doing. NOW the occassional doctor can be found who says lowering fat at the least probably does not help, and most especially if those calories are replaced with carbohydrates(sugar). But for 30 danged years you could hardly find a doctor or gov health official who would recommend differently. Get rid of that butter and steak and bacon, replace with bread and margarine! There might be millions of early death and disease related to this advice, but hey at least business has remained good in the medical field, not to mention agriculture! What the heck is with all of these so called scientists giving such advice for 30-40 years? But at long last, like you say, they are starting to get it right. In the meantime, they probably killed or injured a whole lot of folks. Science(or at least so called science that is influenced by politics and business or other things) is often great, even amazing, but often has it dead wrong. Finally, we are starting to see many, many more articles and studies like this(just the most current example being discussed at a health forum I go to):
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2112771 ... urated-fat
Off Topic
For years, health experts have blamed the standard American diet for rising rates of diabetes and heart disease. But when it comes to finding a fix, even scientists can’t agree on what we should or should not eat.
Take fat, for example. Over the last few decades, doctors have recommended a diet low in saturated fat to avoid chronic disease.
Saturated fat is found in animal products like dairy, eggs, and meat, and tropical plants such as coconut and palm. These fats have been a fundamental part of many traditional diets around the world for centuries, but doctors today insist saturated fat will harm our health.
The American Heart Association recommends restricting saturated fats to no more than 5 percent of everything you eat. On its website, the organization states that “decades of sound science” has proven saturated fat “can raise your ‘bad’ cholesterol and put you at higher risk for heart disease.”
However, some researchers question whether saturated fat is really as bad as the medical establishment says it is. One such scientist is Dr. Deanna Gibson, an immunologist, microbiologist, and associate professor of Biology at University of British Columbia (UBC), Okanagan Campus....In a culture obsessed with thin, eating fat doesn’t sound very attractive. But Gibson says our biology requires that we eat some quality fat every day for good brain function and a healthy body.
“We only have three things to eat: carbohydrate, protein, and fat. For some reason, we’ve chosen in the last few decades to focus on how bad fats are in general,” Gibson said. “Your whole body depends on fat. All of our membranes are made of phospholipids. Your hormones depend on the types of fat and the amount of fat that you eat.”
Nutrition Research
The stigma against saturated fat in particular is so strong that up until the 2000s, trans-fat was promoted as a healthy alternative to saturated fat. Today, dietary guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommend eating fat from vegetable sources such as soy, corn, sunflower, and canola instead of meat and dairy fats. But Gibson suggests that conventional wisdom may be wrong again.
“We base our hypotheses on previous literature or previous assumptions, and it turns out wrong when you do the studies,” she said. “I’m often shocked about how little is scientifically known in nutrition. I wonder how we get to these assumptions, because I can’t come up with a good answer from the scientific perspective.”.........“We have to be more critical about the studies that we interpret. Most of the nutrition clinical trials that are out there are very poorly done, and most of the rodent studies never led to a clinical study. It doesn’t inform the next step,” she said.
Chronic Inflammation
We may not have to worry about infections or nutritional deficiencies like our ancestors did, but the modern world has its own set of health problems. The diseases that plague people today stem largely from chronic inflammation, and based on the evidence she has seen, Gibson believes that our Omega 6-heavy diets are partially to blame.
“When you eat a diet really rich in things that promote those inflammatory responses, then your body really doesn’t know how to shut that down anymore,” she said. “If we had a mixed diet, a combination of all these fats together, then it probably wouldn’t be a problem. But people today have diets that are very rich in Omega 6 and are deliberately avoiding saturated fat. That’s when it becomes really problematic.”............Another nutrition researcher at UBC, Dr. Sanjoy Ghosh, points to other problems with high PUFA vegetable oils. A study he published last year finds that these vegetable fats contribute to sedentary behavior and a predisposition to insulin resistance, similar to that observed in Type 2 diabetes.
“I’ve been studying fat for 12 years,” Ghosh said. “In earlier studies I found that sunflower oil was worse than palm oil, and people couldn’t believe it. But I’m convinced, and I think other people now understand, that saturated fat is not as bad as we thought.”................
The Rise of Vegetable Oils
While many believe science alone informs dietary guidelines, Ghosh says such advice is often shaped by social, political, and economic forces. In fact, it can take decades for good scientific evidence to overcome these other influences...............“It happened with trans-fats,” Ghosh said. “We’ve known they were bad since the 1980s, and 20 years later the government finally agreed. But then all the big food companies said, ‘Hey, we can’t change our oil so fast. We need time, because the new oil changes our flavor profile.'”
According to Ghosh, the demonization of saturated fat is more of a story spun to benefit industry, rather than facts based on science. He urges people to read the article, The Oiling of America by the Weston A. Price Foundation, a food advocacy group dedicated to promoting traditional diets. The article gives a detailed history of vegetable oil marketing in America, and unpacks many unscientific reasons for why saturated fat is shunned today.
“In the 1950s and 1960s, the North American oil crop farmers were getting hammered by the Malaysian and Indonesian imports of coconut oil. It’s the same thing that’s happening to the U.S. manufacturers with stuff from China today,” Ghosh said. “Essentially, no saturated fat containing plants can grow properly in North America. What we do grow is sunflower, safflower, canola, corn, etc. So from the 1950s on, saturated fat was considered to be bad.”............
But what about all that “sound science” the American Heart Association says links saturated fat to heart disease? Ghosh says that when you consider how long we’ve restricted our saturated fat intake, the case against it doesn’t hold up.
“In the last 30 years, North American fat consumption has changed drastically. People used to cook with lard, but nobody does this today. We eat what is available. Everything in the market has consciously taken saturated fat out,” Ghosh said. “Our saturated fat intake has not increased over the last 30 years. So why is heart disease still rising? If saturated fat was causing this, logically it should drop if we take it out of the diet. But it’s still going up.”
According to the American Heart Association’s 2015 Heart Disease and Strokes Statistics Update, cardiovascular disease is the leading global cause of death, accounting for over 17 million deaths per year. That number is expected to grow to nearly than 24 million by 2030.
So with all the saturated fat reductions of the last 40 years, combined with all the increased consumption of
healthy corn oil and such, combined with the docs wanting us on statin drugs from the womb, what the heck are CV deaths increasing for? Not to forget diabetes and obesity? Something stinks. And science seems to be at least partly behind it. Yes, sure, science will eventually get it right. But in the meantime 50 years may go by and millions may die early. ( Hey, at least they can keep us alive longer with our heart disease via bypass surgery and stents! Business is good! )
Rom8:21the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption23..but..we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit.. groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body