US ambassador killed over a film

[kandrathe]

I never said people couldn't be X and Y, and in fact, I've acknowledged many times that they can be both. What they CANNOT do is converge X and Y with one another in their profession as a scientist. As I stated before, religion and science are not compatible with one another - the minute you inject the former into the latter, it is no longer science....

I figured you'd begger out of it. Choose some useful skill like composing, or mathematics, and interject it into something philosophically esoteric. You can do it, you often just get crap. Although, sometimes, when someone is truly a master at both, the result is profound. Like Bach.

What is so hard to grasp about this?

Your ever shifting stand on the issue. And... I disagree.

If a person attempts to combine sculpture and poetry, and get crappy sculpture and crappy poetry then it's on their head and their professional reputation. Scientists can recognize good science, and are fully capable of peer reviewing others work to the tenets of their craft. If someone falls short, then its on their head. We don't need your prohibition to "never cross the streams", it innately exists in the pursuit of "truth".

This "I don't want no darn religious thinkers in my profession!" smacks of bigotry to me. So you excise them from science, what's next? Education? "I don't want no darn religious thinkers brain washing my children!" Then what?

A *real* scientist understand the need for testability, repeatability, and observability in hypothesis and experimentation. There is a lot of crappy theories (derived from the imaginations of rational minds) in science that have no foundation in equations, and are purely speculative. They are often just ideas seeking a foundation in reality. The solar system did not revolve around the Earth just because the Vatican said it was so. When people make disprovable claims, such as that, it only weakens their reputation in making future claims.

The frustrating thing for scientists today is the amount of crap being heaped into the journals, whether or not it's inspired by religiosity.

I would go so far as to say that the roots of science and the pursuit of understanding the natural world were often religious; Ever heard of Mendel? Copernicus? There are thousands of others... I'll leave you with this; "Accordingly, a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance and loftiness of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. They exist with the same necessity and matter-of-factness as he himself. In this sense religion is the age-old endeavor of mankind to become clearly and completely conscious of these values and goals and constantly to strengthen and extend their effect. If one conceives of religion and science according to these definitions then a conflict between them appears impossible. For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts. According to this interpretation the well-known conflicts between religion and science in the past must all be ascribed to a misapprehension of the situation which has been described" - A. Einstein, Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York in 1941