Francis CollinsThe director of the National Institutes of Health – an evangelical Christian – told The New Yorker he was stunned by a federal judge's decision last week to halt federal funding for research on embryonic stem cells.
In a profile released Monday, author Peter Boyer writes that Collins has been able to balance science and faith.
His appointment to the job by President Obama had worried some scientists, already concerned by what one called the "theocracy" of the George W. Bush presidency.
The order goes beyond politics, Collins told Boyer.
"Patients and their families are counting on us to do everything in our power, ethically and responsibly, to learn how to transform these cells into entirely new therapies," he explained. "It's time to accelerate human-embryonic-stem-cell research, not throw on the brakes."
The writer, who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, is gaining praise for a critically acclaimed memoir she's just released. "Beyond Katrina: A Meditation of the Mississippi Gulf Coast" is an ode to North Gulfport, Mississippi, where Trethewey's family has lived for three generations. The area is considered one of the most blighted regions along the Mississippi coast, the author said in an essay released last week in The New York Times.
North Gulfport is a city filled with "For Sale" signs, condemned structures, weed-filled lots, and a few neat houses "hunkered against the neighborhood's demise," Trethewey wrote.
While she has now relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, where she is a professor at Emory University, her brother Joe and cousin Tammy remain in the area.
Joe tends to the yard outside their grandmother's home, Trethewey wrote, because he cannot afford to fix up the house that is falling in on itself. Blue hydrangeas bloom, thanks to Joe's care. Such a façade keeps the city from condemning the building, she explained, and helps Joe hold onto a piece of the pre-Katrina past.
"Before Katrina, change was natural," Trethewey wrote. "In the post-Katrina landscape, all change is haunted by the devastation of the storm, and thus inseparable from it."
The New York Times: Our loss, through the eye of the storm
NPR: Moving 'Beyond Katrina' through poetry and prose
The former fireman and paramedic, who never got a college degree, leads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Craig Fugate told The New York Times Magazine, in a profile published Sunday, that he knows he's not typical Obama "Ivy League stock."
"I wouldn't hold me up as an example of what people can do without a degree," he said. "I must have fallen through the cracks."
Fugate was orphaned by age 15, and raised by his grandmother.
"Everybody likes to attribute [my emergency management skills] to something in my background, something in my family," he told the Times. "I'm more Zen-like. I don't know if there's a reason."
Raised in Alachua, Florida, Fugate was appointed as Florida's head of emergency management services in 2001 by then-Gov. Jeb Bush. He became FEMA administrator in 2009.
What advice does he offer in the way of preparing for the worst? Stock up on water, peanut butter, and cash, and don't get overwhelmed.
"You have to start defining what you are trying to achieve, what outcome you need to get to be stable and start planning back from that," he said.
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Science has not proven that the universe had a beginning. It could have always existed. The big bang is a deduction from the observation that the universe is expanding. The almost natural assumption is that the universe is expanding from a point. So if that point, regardless of how minutely small, is matter or potential matter–then where did that matter come from if matter is neither created nor destroyed? Bertrand Russell asked the question, if the creator is a "first cause" then what is the cause that made first cause at which point we return to the possibility that the universe always existed. Stephen Wright (comedian and philosopher) asked, "If the universe is everything and the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?"
t is interesting to me that James is so passionate about the Big Bang, that we would have to be stupid to ignore the evidence. Yet James will come up short if asked why the Big Bang happened? What caused it?
Christians already have the answer.
Men occassionally stumble over the truth but most pick themselves up and continue on as if nothing happened.- Winston Churchill
Apparently matter can be created by someone because scientist claim that the universe is X years old. So apparently prior to that there was nothing. Therefore something had to have created everything.
See, this is exactly a misrepresentation of what science gives us. Science is not a "this is how it is" explanation of our surroundings. Day in and day out scientific theories our re written to better "predict" our universe. Science does not state that nothing came before the big bang. As a matter of fact if you read any reputable text on the subject they almost all state that our current understanding of physics can not describe what happens in such a dense and energetic existence. That is the whole point of science. It is to advance our understanding of this universe. What is so inherently wrong with that. Why are so many religious people afraid of accepting some of these principles?
If you tell yourself a thing over and over for which you have no evidence, it becomes "true" anyway. This is how beliefs are formed even if we're talking about the beliefs that limit your own potential, the ones that you do not want.
I am not trying to be flippant but I think you didn't mean "Christians already have the answer," you mean
"Christians don't have the answer but they believe they do"...like other people who think their description of the creator is the "correct" one.
The "correct" description really depends on the individual, as a free choice. Freedom of religion is good and freedom from religion is good.
Science can tell us how to do a great many things but it cannot tell us what ought to be done.
I accidentally posted this above when I realized there is no point in arguing with that individual.
Morality is...how we ought to live. It is the realm of philosophy called ethics or moral philosophy. You know, science, as magical as it seems to us, as powerful as it seems, is just a single branch of philosophy. I am a career scientist and I will tell you, there is no magic, it is almost all math based on physical observation.
Chapter 4, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, by James Rachels the American moral philosopher wrote in that chapter called "Does Morality Depend on Religion?" that morality, or how we ought to live can be described by a minimum definition which is:
"Morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one's conduct by reason. That is, doing what there are the best reasons for doing, considering the best interests of all those affected by what one does."
He also points out that absolute rules, of the type which religions often demand, sometimes have to be broken because there are exceptions where the moral rule is not right in itself.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishable from magic.
The term "magic" implies supernatural which implies existence beyond the natural universe. Therefore your statement is invalid. All technology can be explained and reproduced by science. It is not magic.
Now on the other hand, it would be magic to people who are uneducated in science. (ie. people who refuse to educate themselves in science)
Magic is when one person knows the secret. Science could be called magic but only when that information is suppressed to others. Everyone gets to share in the common knowledge of science however, in fact it requires scrutiny in order to be good science.
C. S. Lewis said:
If no set of moral ideas were better than another, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to Nazi morality. The moment you say one lot of morals is better than another, you are in fact measuring them by an ultimate standard.
"If no set of moral ideas were better than another"
Rachels actually addresses this subject directly in Chapter 3, called "Is morality subjective?"
The answer is no.
So Hitler's moral ideas were equal to Jesus's. Couldn't disagree more.
Pascal's wager is a false dilemma of two invented choices.
So let me ask you since you used the word "gamble". If you bet that there is no God and you are right, what do you get? Nothing!!! If you bet that there is a God and you are right, what do you get? Eternal life in paradise.
Humans typically have learned two things on this earth that can temporarily override reason, i mean good reasons. Those two things are pain and pleasure. Religions typically appeal to either pain or pleasure and they make it seem like you are free to choose. If you look at European history, the Church which gave legitimacy to the false notion that one family has divine right over others, hoarded money, and suppressed dissenting opinions out of self interest. The people didn't have a choice then because if they dissented they were murdered at the stake.
I have a question for you then. Do you believe the creator of the vast universe has such poor emotional intelligence and creates children he supposedly loves but then puts them up to arbitrary tests and then wipes them out if they fail? Sending Jesus, an immortal god to earth is not actually a sacrifice, but a acknowledgment of mere existence.
Jesus said "love your neighbor as yourself" and that is the best idea that Christianity has to offer, imo. That is why Christianity is respectable in that small part, but alas, the message is lost as license to judge others, it seems. So I don't let those emotions into the gateway of my mind, because that is the evil that the Bible describes, human hubris and folly.
Jesus was a wise man but so was Socrates. Yet I don't attend church services to pay homage to his ideas for which I am grateful. I don't make an existential gamble on a false dilemma of two invented choices such as either it will be boiling sulfurous hell or believe that Jesus was a god, you decide.
The term "magic" implies supernatural which implies existence beyond the natural universe. Therefore your statement is invalid. All technology can be explained and reproduced by science. It is not magic.
Actually it isn't my statement, it is Arthur C Clarkes.
All technology cannot be explained and reproduced by (human) science if that technology is sufficiently advanced enough. God's technology would appear to us as magic, as supernatural. That doesn't mean that there is no explaination. That only means that we are not capable of comprehending it.
"I don't make an existential gamble on a false dilemma of two invented choices"
So let me ask you since you used the word "gamble". If you bet that there is no God and you are right, what do you get? Nothing!!! If you bet that there is a God and you are right, what do you get? Eternal life in paradise.
So even a fool that bets that there is a God and it turns out there isn't one, has the same outcome as someone who knew all along that there wasn't a God.
A wise man once said, I would rather live my life like there is a God only to die and find out there isn't one, than live my life like there isn't one only to die and find out there is one.
Religions typically appeal to either pain or pleasure and they make it seem like you are free to choose. If you look at European history, the Church which gave legitimacy to the false notion that one family has divine right over others, hoarded money, and suppressed dissenting opinions out of self interest. As Bertrand Russell points out, they appeal to the basest human emotions. The people didn't have a choice then because if they dissented they were murdered at the stake. What is "rapture" but revenge? a way for people to say "haha! I was right and you were wrong now burn"
No not at all. You mentioned it yourself "Love your neighbor as you love yourself". I don't wish to burn and I claim to be a Christian so therefore I don't wish anyone else to burn either. Neither did Jesus. In fact, that was the main reason Jesus came so that nobody has to.
God cannot deny himself. He is just. Therefore there has to be justice in the universe. The wage of sin is death. No human being in without sin therefore we all deserve death. Jesus paid the price for all. All we have to do is acknowledge it and be grateful for it.
I agree with you, I think Jesus' message is far more simple than people realize. God is between you and me, it's the relationship we people have with each other. Some others say god is loving others and being loved and that's all that matters in this life. Sounds right to me.
Early Christians, the first ones, including Paul, used to believe in reincarnation. At the Council of Nicea, the political church change that to include the idea of original sin, words that were never uttered by Jesus. So they invented a different religion. One that is inherently unfair and unjust, an idea to tell people they were born evil sinners in order to get them to comply with the church. In old Europe the daily game was that the church played involved embracing what would be called paternalism and fascism today, not morals.