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+--- Thread: Conspirituality + Is there a place for spirituality in space science? (/thread-11665.html)
Conspirituality + Is there a place for spirituality in space science? - C C - Jan 31, 2022
Conspirituality is finally getting called out for what it is - anti-science cranks & alternative medicine hucksters
https://www.science20.com/hank_campbell/conspirituality_is_finally_getting_called_out_for_what_it_is_antiscience_cranks_and_alternative_medicine_hucksters
EXCERPTS: Last year, when CNN journalist Chris Cuomo was recovering from COVID-19, he endorsed all sorts of homeopathy and alternatives to medicine. It's no surprise, he is married to an influencer who just happens to sell those placebos to other wealthy, white elites. He's not alone. A surprising number of celebrities have spouses that promote nonsense.
For decades, the woo market has been mostly wealthy, white Baby Boomers who believe that science, from biotech to medicine, is a vast corporate conspiracy. Their alternative-medicine-practitioner-in chief, President Bill Clinton, not only signed a bad law exempting supplements and potions from real FDA oversight, his re-branded National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine was able to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money that could have gone to real science and health research.
New Age beliefs that medicine is unnecessary or, worse, harmful, became so prevalent during the Obama years it even got its own name - conspirituality. They believe that Ancient Wisdom holds all the answers and some mysterious force can be harnessed, kind of like The Force in "Star Wars" before George Lucas flipped it from being a universal energy to those blessed with particular genes. All that is holding it back is corporations lobbying government to suppress herbs and crystals ... because Big Pharma can't control those.
Even "Rolling Stone", arguably the official magazine of aging Baby Boomers, is on Team Science these days. They call out Kimberly Van Der Beek... [...] California, the US home of the anti-vaccine movement, to stop 'wave of the hand' exemptions from vaccines ... And every other progressive anti-science fad of the last 10 years...
[...] She claimed, while COVID-19 vaccines were in development, that she had a family history of medical issues with vaccines when she was promoting another conspirituality advocate that sold nonsense like colloidal silver... (MORE - missing details)
Is there a place for spirituality in space science?
https://undark.org/2022/01/27/is-there-a-place-for-spirituality-in-space-science/
EXCERPT: . . . These are all valid concerns. But it’s also worth remembering that Nelson’s biblical references follow in a long tradition of religious rhetoric in the U.S. space program. There’s a tendency to flatten this history - to imagine that religious language is and always has been inappropriate in the scientific discourse. But one needs only look back a few decades to find a time when comments like Nelson’s were not only acceptable in the American space culture - they were a central part of America’s science identity.
[...] From the 1950s, the United States was embroiled in a decades-long rivalry with the U.S.S.R. known as the Space Race - a competition that turned the technological and military practicalities of space exploration into a sort of proxy battle for cultural, political, and economic validation. Each nation’s scientific successes were interpreted as triumphs of one national ideology over the other. Among those warring ideologies were the nations’ sharply contrasting attitudes toward religion.
The U.S.S.R. had officially embraced atheism (though some Soviet citizens were people of faith). In her recent history of Soviet atheism, Victoria Smolkin describes how Soviet leaders and cosmonauts used their victories in the Space Race as occasions to wave a banner of antipathy toward religion. During a 1962 visit to the U.S., Smolkin writes, Soviet cosmonaut German Titov, the second person in space, proclaimed his atheism, remarking “that he had not seen ‘God or angels’ during his 17 orbits of Earth.” Later Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev similarly joked to American reporters about God’s failure to show up in space. The brash rejection of God served to advance the Soviet effort to solidify state atheism and defuse religion’s threat to state authority.
But the Soviet Union’s dismissal of religion also stirred a backlash on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In fields ranging from evolutionary biology to cosmology, American scientists criticized the ideological dogmatism of Marxism, claiming that it impaired free scientific inquiry. Whereas the Soviet regime was totalitarian and oppressive, the American scientific establishment, by embracing religious tolerance, projected an image of openness. Opposed to the strict atheism of the Soviets but wary of the perceived anti-science attitude of fundamentalist Christians, the American scientific establishment staked out a middle ground of respectable, generic - but still Christian-leaning - religiosity.
As public figures as well as scientists, NASA astronauts were frequently seen as exemplifying this milquetoast religious identity. Some astronauts were explicit about their own Christianity; others were more vague about the spirituality they experienced in the stars. Neil Armstrong, though he considered himself a deist, was nonetheless looked up to as a Christian role model who fulfilled a divine promise that humanity would someday reach the stars.
[...] The scientific, religious, and political culture of the U.S., however, has evolved tremendously since then. Christian nationalism has become a widespread and antidemocratic political force - one that has been deployed to attack government-supported, science-based efforts to stem the Covid-19 pandemic and curtail climate change. Cold War-era God-talk, and the embrace of generic religiosity, no longer exemplify America’s place in the modern geopolitical world. The words Nelson uses to capture his connection with the cosmos may not have changed since the 1980s, but it’s a different nation now... (MORE - missing details)
RE: Conspirituality + Is there a place for spirituality in space science? - Magical Realist - Feb 1, 2022
Quote:New Age beliefs that medicine is unnecessary or, worse, harmful, became so prevalent during the Obama years it even got its own name - conspirituality. They believe that Ancient Wisdom holds all the answers and some mysterious force can be harnessed, kind of like The Force in "Star Wars" before George Lucas flipped it from being a universal energy to those blessed with particular genes.
There's an extention of this anti-medication movement in the mental health field. Patients and even doctors promoting the notion that psych meds don't work and can even harm you. I attended the screening of a film about a man who was bipolar who went off his meds and suffered as a result, eventually landing himself in the psych ward. Still rationalized that he didn't need meds. I left the theater before the Q and A began. I have no interest in this sort of holistic voodoo medicine. Meds work amazingly well for me, as long as you take them in the right doses and don't keep going off of them.
RE: Conspirituality + Is there a place for spirituality in space science? - Syne - Feb 2, 2022
People usually go off their meds because the meds make them feel less than human. And even though some meds can help moderate symptoms, there's no substitute for handling the actual causes. But if you're too inured to muster the wherewithal, a lifetime of meds is probably the next best thing.