The Neumanns have awakened in me a desire to buy a pair of steel-toed boots. In order to educate them.
The treatment for childhood diabetes is simple, straightforward, and has been known for years. However, the Neumanns didn't want "to put the doctor before god". Perhaps they didn't travel by automobile because those aren't mentioned in the Bible? Though I doubt it. Did they refuse to take aeroplanes? Or use the telephone? They sent out an appeal for prayer by e-mail. I missed where computers, and the internet, were mentioned in the Pentateuch. Perhaps they turn up in the Pseudepigrapha, which I know less about.
A colleague of mine's first university job was teaching at the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria. He's currently worried because old friends of his are caught up in the current mess there, led by the equivalent of the Neumanns, Muslims who belong to an organisation called "Boko haram" -- secular learning is forbidden -- which wants to ban "Western" knowledge because it is a threat to their version of Islam. All over the world, the advocates of the most hidebound, narrow religious interpretations are afraid of plain, ordinary scientific knowledge because it means that the purveyors of mumbo-jumbo can no longer sell fake solutions to real problems. Their answer is to kill people or let them die from inattention, whether it be Muslims who disagree with them, or little girls with diabetes.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 01:51 pm (UTC)The treatment for childhood diabetes is simple, straightforward, and has been known for years. However, the Neumanns didn't want "to put the doctor before god". Perhaps they didn't travel by automobile because those aren't mentioned in the Bible? Though I doubt it. Did they refuse to take aeroplanes? Or use the telephone? They sent out an appeal for prayer by e-mail. I missed where computers, and the internet, were mentioned in the Pentateuch. Perhaps they turn up in the Pseudepigrapha, which I know less about.
A colleague of mine's first university job was teaching at the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria. He's currently worried because old friends of his are caught up in the current mess there, led by the equivalent of the Neumanns, Muslims who belong to an organisation called "Boko haram" -- secular learning is forbidden -- which wants to ban "Western" knowledge because it is a threat to their version of Islam. All over the world, the advocates of the most hidebound, narrow religious interpretations are afraid of plain, ordinary scientific knowledge because it means that the purveyors of mumbo-jumbo can no longer sell fake solutions to real problems. Their answer is to kill people or let them die from inattention, whether it be Muslims who disagree with them, or little girls with diabetes.