For Bush, science is a dirty word

[True_Blue]

The interference by the White House in the case of Terri Schiavo - the woman at the centre of America's latest right-to-die controversy - marks another milestone in President Bush's campaign for faith over fact. More concerned with the wonder of miracles than Schiavo's 15-year irreversible vegetative state, Bush and his allies have blithely overturned multiple court decisions to maintain artificial feeding and let evangelical populism triumph over medical opinion.

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Thanks to the policies and prejudices of the Bush administration, science has become a dirty word. The American century was built on scientific progress. From the automobile to the atom bomb to the man on the moon, science and technology underpinned American military, commercial and cultural might. Crucial to that was the presidency. From FDR and the Los Alamos laboratory to Kennedy and Nasa to Clinton and decoding the genome, the White House was vital to promoting ground-breaking research and luring the world's scientific elite. But Bush's faith-based, petro-chemical administration has reversed that tradition: excepting matters military, this presidency exhibits an abiding aversion to scientific inquiry that is in danger of affecting the entire country.

Neal Lane, former science adviser to Clinton, has spoken of "a pattern of abuse of science" in policy making within today's White House. What they don't like, they suppress and distort. Official publications on the science of climate change have been brazenly replaced with drafts from utility lobbyists. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report linking industry emissions to global warming had to be withdrawn at the behest of West Wing advisers - not many of them noted climatologists.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1443104,00.html

[Malva Zebrina]

1. the conflict between religion and science has been going on for centuries

and many lives have been lost because of the backward looking perspective of the church and it's resistance to science, mostly the Catholic church because it was the only one around for centuries, but also the Protestants later.

If anyone is interested in this conflict, the book written more than one hundred years ago by
Andrew White entitled The Warfare of Science With Theology if one has a lot of time to read is public domain and is available on the wab in it's entirety. It is easy for the layman to read and is chock full of information, but it does take a whole lot of time to read. I enjoyed it and maybe some others would be interested in pursuing the history of the church and it's clashes with science, setting back the advancement that would have benefitted human beings by almost a thousand years.

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/andrew_white/Andrew_White.html

[atommom]

4. I've been gradually wading my way through a similar book on

my Palm, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science by John William Draper. It is very interesting, but it's depressing to see the cycle of religious oppression recurring over and over, with so much knowledge lost each time. I'll have to take a look at the Andrew White book too.

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DraHist.html

[Malva Zebrina]

5. Thank you for that

I have bookmarked it. I have a lot of time, but not the strength in my eyes to spend a lot of time reading a monitor screen. Nevertheless, I am grateful to get the facts.

[Jack Rabbit]

2. Science is reality based

They have no use for that in the Bush White House.

[Tux]

3. This is why

Christianity needs to be redefined. It has so much fantasy that science can disprove and they get upset. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics, Toaists, et al have no problem with science. Some would say science confirms their faiths. If they can accept reality, maybe Christianity can too.