Britain's new cultural divide is not between Christian and Muslim, Hindu and Jew. It is between those who have faith and those who do not.

[bossykate]

fascinating article in today's guardian.

here

pruni. Come back right now.

Message withdrawn

sigh.

ok DC. amerindians. a culture that is very old. working in tandem with and with ultimate respect for it's environment.

midwifery. real midwifery. mitt wif. whereby wisdom about childbirth was passed from woman to woman, and they did know waht they were doing.

along comes victorian shitesville and decides that women need to be prone in order that the physician (man of science, read, overlord) can see better (no other reason) and women's birthing processes become more painful, more dangerous and just worse.

the use of herbs and of prevention to keep people from getting ill rather than cutting out and destroying cells after the fact. as in chinese medicine, ayurveda and most ancient forms of healthcare. they are not iatrogenic. they look at the human from a holistic point of view, recognise the interplay between emotion and physical health.

i could go on and on and on.

i really think that the great god science is a singularly simplistic and therefore dangerous notion.

you might think that ancient socities were 'brutal' but they didn't totally f*ck the planet up to the extent that they were looking at extinction or certainly end of life as we know it scenarios did they...oops...sorry aloha, i forgot you don't buy into the global warming hypothesis do you?

uarruaghhh.

I"m utterly alone here aren't i.

i've fucked off the christians. pissed off the atheists. wound up the scientists. exposed myself as an irrational loon by finding astrology fascinating...

the tumbleweed doth roll....

fuck it. i do believe all this.

Funny how people like Mary who use the 'I'm only doing it for you' argument to justfiy inflicting torment never apply the same logic to themselves. Yes, agree there was a different POV then about the soul being jolly important - same line used by the Spanish Inquisition. But it was always self-serving.

herbal remidies work by chemical entities in the herbsbinding to receptor proteins on cells. In just the same was as 'chemical' drugs do. Herbal remidies can cause just as many iatrogenic side effects as modern drugs can....in fact since the amounts of active ingredients in a herb can vary wildly depending on the growing conditions herbsmay well cause more side effectm, since the does cannot be accuratly predicted.

I used to work in drug safety monitoring and saw mant recorded side effects of herbal treatment.

So sorry, you are quite wrong about the 'safety' of herbal medicine

?sorry. he hates religion. he is absolutely convinced that it is a mass hallucination born of ignorance and that science is somehow 'better'.?

I don?t think this is correct. He ?hates? (for want of a better word) religion trying to get a foothold in science, and respected as a science, as with ?intelligent design? as it attempts to askew the very method science emerges from, ie relentless questioning and testing. ID, and Creationism only argues to consolidate itself, as does religion. This is the opposite of what we know of as science, and why millions of people climb into airplanes and know they have a high probability of getting from a to b safely, because those rigorous questions have been asked, and are still being asked in order to improve things. They don?t get in a plane or car and have ?faith? the steering will work.

Dawkins? is actually launching a counter attack in response to religion?s attack on science.

He doesn't think it's 'better' at all - as a system for understanding the physical world around us, it's the only way we have.

Erm, how has 'science' fucked the planet? 'Science' isn't consciously capable of doing anything actually. It's people who do that.

did i say that herbs were safer or was the point i was making that herbal medicine along with the other older forms of medicine that i referred to work much more on prevention and also consider the human in a holistic way rather than as a bunch of discrete cells/parts to be dealt with when they go wrong.

i am obviously making a hash of my own arguments. dawkins would undoubtedly have me down as one of the 'know nothings' he refers to.

Good post, mt. That's how i understand his position too.

if his position is exclusively anti-creationist, then i'm with him

i would strongly dispute the notion that science is the only means we have of interpreting our physical environment. but i am absolutely not going to convince any of you of that.

'the use of herbs and of prevention to keep people from getting ill rather than cutting out and destroying cells after the fact. as in chinese medicine, ayurveda and most ancient forms of healthcare. they are not iatrogenic. they look at the human from a holistic point of view, recognise the interplay between emotion and physical health. '

I took this to mean that you were saying that herbal medicines were not iatrogenic. Also the comment that they do not 'destroy cells after the fact' is also not always the case either.

There is no difference, biochemically, between curing a headache with willow bark tea, or an aspirin, they both rely on he same active ingredient. If a herbal remedy work, it is because it has an active chemical in it. It will work in just the same way as a 'conventional ' drug, except you don't know the dose, or potential contaminants. It doesn't work because it is holistic, it works because there is an interaction between a chemical and a receptor protein

Oh no, I know quite a lot about the 'theory' behind astrology, actually, and the more I know the more risible it is. It was invented when nobody had the faintest idea what the planets were. It is all made up. The time of year you are born does affect you slightly, actually, but that has nothing to do with the stars and planets, it has to do with the effects of light and viruses on the mother when you are in utero, and to a lessening degree on the kind of food available (now thanks to supermarkets this is much less important). In other words, there is a proper scientific explantion for it. Which there isn't for astrology.
I tell you what I think is 'sex magick' being able to actually SEE the moment when the sperm penetrates the egg, and then the moment when that single cell, marvellously, divides into two. It's bloody amazing. And more importantly for me, real.

Your right, it isn't the only means we have, BUT due to its rigorous standards, it's the safest and most accurate one we have.

just for you then aloha.....and this miracle visualised through the wonders of science and technology

John Diamond wrote brilliantly about the hoaxers in alternative medicine in a book he never completed because he was dying of cancer. He points out that scientists are always ready to look at the evidence on herbal medicine, and if it works, use it, and if their 'conventional medicine' doesn't work, they stop using it. The charlatans simply refuse to look at any evidence at all. Fab stuff - with a foreword from Dawkins too!

try again with bettwe technology this time!

Curses, not working MB!

It is rather awe-inspiring though, isn't it? That's where I really 'get' Dawkins. The world around us is so amazing and beautiful and the science is so mind boggling and profound, why look elsewhere?

aloha drugs companies are singularly uninterested in anything that they cannot patent.

One of my friends is really into astrology. You have no IDEA how much I have to bite my tongue!

But you can - and they do - patent remedies derived from effective plants. All the time!

yes. it's criminal in the literal sense of the word isn't it?

breathtakingly, amazingly mindblowingly wonderful animation of a cell, not real, but totaly scientifically accurate takes an age to dwon load, but worth every second

How amazing we humans are that we can understand a microscopic cell to this level and to see it astonishing beauty, not with our eyes but with our minds!