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From: arndt@lymph.DEC
Newsgroups: net.religion,net.flame
Subject: Quo Vadis Science?
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Date: Wed, 12-Dec-84 12:25:14 EST
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Posted: Wed Dec 12 12:25:14 1984
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For Rich Rosen, Gordon T. Muffin, Andy Banta and other slugs on the bottem
of the moral barrel.  (Lov ya guys -:)

              CLAPTRAP AND & OTHER CAUSES OF ANOMIE

"Where have all the morals come from?" "Morals, morals; got the morals?"
                              - Cry on Usenet by the above gang

"Is nothing humorous anymore?"
                              - KA

I suspect that you guys not only don't know where morals come from but you
haven't a clue where YOU came from!  Asleep in the liberal arts classes again!
----------------------------

"Satire is a very old genre, as old, in fact, as man's folly and wickedness.
And it is a moral genre - its force is derived from showing the divergence of
what IS from what OUGHT TO BE.  In order to show this divergence, to illuminate
and ridicule it, and so correct it, satire is dependent on a normative idea and
standard of good and evil, right and wrong, on a consensus as to the existence
and character of moral order, in society, and in the individual as inter-
dependent entities.  For such a norm convincingly to exist there must be a
widely shared and generally felt belief as to the origin and destination, the
meaning and purpose of collective and individual life: this consensus is a
philosophical vision of man and a statement about his place in the universe.

The coherent configurations of both personality and culture are heavily
dependent on this social and moral formulation of reality, on a shared vision
of life that entails norms and hierarchies of value and meaning.  The vision
is finally spiritual, moral, and imaginative; it produces and enacts the
structure of meaning itself.  Even those who may hate a given hierarchy of
meaning usually derive their sense of psychic location from it and exist mainly
in its terms.

Our secularized and pluralistic age has been charaterized by an assault on
and gradual dismemberment of any consensus other than that of a lowest-common-
denominator agnostic materialism."
                - Michael Aeschliman, writing in The University Bookman, Sum'84
                     p99.
--------------------------
Now I may not be the greatest humorist (or speller) in the world but I really
do think that the reason some of you don't like my sense of humor is because
as Aeschliman points out above you don't ascribe to the same value system as
I do.  And visa versa.  

But more importantly, I see you nits tearing down a value system without one
to replace it - result - chaos in society.  Hence when I asked you to come up
with where YOU get your values from, I thought it was an important question.
Am I right that I didn't quite get an answer?  I see nothing you have to offer
except a false sence of 'freedom' and 'progress' involved in doing away with
the Judaeo-Christian norms.
----------------------------

Peter L. Berger (2nd baseman for . . .??)
"Any historical society is an order, a protective structure of meaning, 
errected in the face of chaos. Within this order the life of the group as
well as the life of the individual makes sense.  Deprived of such order,
both group and individual are threatened with the most fundamental terror,
the terror of chaos that Emile Durkheim called ANOMIE."

"Has Nature set no bounds to wild Desire?
 No Sense to guide, no Reason to enquire,
 What solid Happiness, what empty Pride?
 And what is best indulg'd, or best deny'd?"
        - Pope fr. Sober Advice from Horace


Berger again:
"Throughout most of human history men have believed that the created order
 of society, in one way or onother, corresponds to an underlying order of the
 universe, a divine order that supports and justifies all human attempts at
 order . . . the human faith in order as such [is] a faith closely related to
 man's fundamental trust in reality.  This faith is experienced not only in
 the history of societies and civilizations, but in the life of each 
 individual . . . ."

----------------------------------

You slugs think that through 'science' or 'rationalism' you will come up with
an order for society.  What you will get is an elite to TELL you what the order
is or a changing 51% sociological type of law which I think will devolve into
manipulation by an elite.  Surely you are aware, though perhaps not since you
don't seem to read anything, that 'scientists' (granted only some) are
proposing moral standards?  Remember the picture COMA where the good doctor
says "Society is not deciding these moral issue, therefore WE will decide."
Where there ARE no norms but only moral relativism we are on the road to the
SS recruiting office.

But this is getting too long.  One last quote for now.

"It is important to realize that science does not make assertions about 
ultimate questions - about the riddles of existence, or about man's task
in this world.  This has often been well understood.  But some great
scientists, and many lesser ones, have misunderstood the situation.  The
fact that science cannot make any pronouncements about ethical principles
has been misinterpreted as indicating that there are not such principles, 
while in fact the search for truth presupposes ethics."
               - Karl Popper,( the rock star??) , DIALECTICA 32:342
       
Question:  Is Carl Sagan the new Hitler's point man?

Ans:  Nah, it's Rich Rosen!

Keep readin' those Comic books and Tech. Journals gang,

Ken Arndt