Education

We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in. - William Saroyan, My Name Is Aram, 1940.

It's kind of interesting to consider that, right now, there's a young man - a child in our culture - facing down elephants to get his cows to water in a desert. Or that there are people diving hundreds of feet down with lifelines of air coming from an old diesel compressor, the air tainted with the taste of diesel, so that they can put out nets on the ocean floor to corral fish in. Or that for 700 years, people have been digging under the desert and interconnecting wells for 700 years so that they can have a date farm.

When I use the word 'atomic', I think of all the little subatomic particles. I think of the overall charge of the atom, the Periodic Table, etc. But when most people read the word 'atomic', they seem to think of simply of 'small itty bitty things'.

So then I try using the word 'molecular'. And when I think of molecular, I think of 2 or more atoms bonded either covalently or ionically that may or may not interact with other atoms and molecules. But when most people read 'molecular', they seem to think of 'small itty bitty things'.

While having breakfast with some people close to me yesterday, an agnostic and I were ended up talking about the issue of teaching science and religion in schools to children. My own perspective is pretty clear on the science aspects; I believe not teaching evolution will be bad. Her perspective is that all should be taught and the children should make up their own minds. Arguments for or against her perspective are dangerous - not because she's crazy (she's not, or she's as crazy as I am at most). I don't disagree with her. I also don't agree with her. She and I can have conversations like that because of mutual respect - something that seems to be lacking in most of these discussions.

For one, it's a mistake that some religions - not all - simply haven't incorporated into their systems yet. It took about 367 years for Galileo to be admonished for his work as an example. Organized religion is a bureaucracy and as such resists change vehemently.

While I'm an atheist, though, I'm not an anti-theist. A plausible case could be made that societies with organized religion have done better during the last centuries, where mankind ran across moral and ethical dilemmas. A plausible case can also be made that organized religion has helped create a lot of the problems faced in the last centuries as well as the present. A deity, by its very nature, cannot be proven or disproven - it is accepted on Faith. Thus the discussions of whether there is a deity or not are wonderful diversions for people looking for arguments and seem to me to be a matter of using energy on something that cannot be solved instead of on things that can be solved.