SERIOUSLY????

Salon has an interesting article today entitled Why the GOP distrusts science.

Those very words "distrusts science" offend me.

I think people get confused when they talk about science. When people whine about what science has wrought or how it has impacted the world, what they tend to really be whining about is the implementation of technology.

Technology that has been developed through use of science.

Science is a process. It's a method of testing our environment and aspects of our world to work out how things function and what things are.

Technology consists of the tools we put in place to shift our environment to something that better suits our needs and wants.

Yes, I'm oversimplifying, but to "distrust science" is just so... asinine.

Science is the process of seeing a flame, putting a log in the flame, and seeing the log burn. One can quickly process out that the heat from the flame will burn other things.

So, one who "distrusts science" would therefore put one's hand (or head) into the flame, not realizing said object would burn...

It... I... gah.

Science gave us the technology to go to the goddamn moon! To build nuclear weapons (yikes!). To figure out how to generate electricity. To combat disease!

To distrust the process is just... mind-boggling.

I've never understood people who insist on contrasting science with religion. They're not even apples and oranges.

Science is a process of discovery using observations to determine facts.

Religion is "afterlife insurance". It's faith-based using subject matter of uncertain origin to try to explain the will of an unknown and unknowable entity that may-or-may-not exist. These explanations are, more often than not, simply a form of mass crowd control to reinforce an existing power base or supplant one.

Of course, my definition of religion is pretty subjective and not very scientific.

I'm emotional and angry, so folks will just have to deal, I guess.

Fortunately, I have a short atten---OOH! Shiny thing! Gotta go!