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  •  native american beliefs (4+ / 0-)

    we believe in Mother Earth being, along with the Sun, the parent of all lifewithin her circle. The imposition of Christianity and belief in heaven hid that knowledge. It's good to see some scientists coming to the same conclusion.

    •  Not if it isn't true. (1+ / 0-)

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      linkage

      The desirability of something has no influence on it's truth value.

      --Shannon

    •  Yes, I have had the Native Americans in the (1+ / 0-)

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      linkage

      center of my thoughts on this.  I have diaried on their great influence in the past and will come back to it in future diaries.  Western man has had to come to the truth the Native Americans knew for centuries the hard way.  Science and Western Christianity both have stood in the way.  But the Earth will prevail.  Here is an earlier diary where I used the book God is Red to approach it from the religious aspect. There are many religions being ignored I realize that in Native American culture religion is not compartmentalized from the rest of life as it is in Western culture.

      An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the moment. It stands or falls on its own merits.

      by don mikulecky on Fri May 09, 2008 at 07:11:44 PM PDT

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      •  I happen to live in a tribal college community (2+ / 0-)

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        linkage, don mikulecky
        Looking out from this place I see that there is a tendency among people trained in academic settings to see things in a way that denies that there could be any life beyond that which already has been measured and recorded by "the scientific tradition."

        It could be a function of language.  We think by words we know.  So it could be that what you are doing is finding a vocabulary that makes a somewhat different conversation possible.  If you have read Vine DeLoria, you have some sense of there being world views that used to be considered irreconcilable, but which might really be not so far apart after all.  

        The reasons that the European culture moved in and just plowed over the civilization they encountered all boil down to religion being used as a weapon of mass destruction at the service of profit on an ever larger scale.  

        If we throw off the veil of confusion caused by the Inquisition (an ironic name if there ever was one) and look at what is really there, we have a renewed appreciation for indigenous observation.  They were being real.  

        Europeans roasted medicine men over fires to torture them because they were interested in promoting the idea that there was only value in their own preconceived ways of thinking.  It was incredibly ignorant.

        The next question in the proposition here is that if you accept that the earth's complex systems can heal themselves the way our bodies do, then would you go further and postulate intention?  I would think you probably wouldn't go that far, since that is probably not a testable hypothesis.  One would have to either believe, dogmatically, that there is no such thing or that there is, but it would be beyond observation either way.

        •  Sagan definitely sees intention there (1+ / 0-)

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          linkage

          I have only written about a small part of his ideas because I anticipated antipathy of the sort the troll exhibited.  It will not be easy to comminicate this in English.  Perhaps another language has words and phrases for the concepts.  I can only try to communicate.  It has taken me 72 years to travel this short distance.  I once saw everything in machine like dead terms.  I had to slowly exhaust the most powerful tools of Western science one by one before I became open to another way of thinking.  

          I know we can not reverse the damage done by Western blindness.  I only hope we can go forward together.  I see that going forward as part of the Earth system's way of healing.  We may be given another chance, I don't know.  I wish we could learn what you know.  We are far beyond the limits of testable hypotheses in complexity science.  It is dangerous ground for Western thinkers to leave the "safety" of testible models that are so sterile. If we are not willing to risk that we are lost.  I can only follow where my investigations have led me.  Fortunately, there is a growing awareness of these things among established, well respected scientists.  Sagan is an interesting messenger.  He was parented by a biologist and a physicist, both among the leaders in their fields.  He also practices the Western form of magic.  We need some more potent magic right now.  Thank you for speaking about these matters.  I would like to hear much more if you are willing.

          An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the moment. It stands or falls on its own merits.

          by don mikulecky on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:11:39 PM PDT

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