My least favorite meme right now has to one that states, "Science will admit when it's wrong. Religion will kill to prove it's right." While I'm not really going to touch the last half of that, as it's pretty much empty rhetoric given what some of the popes have said over the last fifty or so years, it's the first half that sort of worries me. There have been numerous examples of Science killing to prove itself right, especially over the last century. It's that people tend to forget that there have been serious lapses in judgment that we need to remember that Science is hardly the lily-white innocent wen it comes to dealing death some think it is.
You only need to go as far back as World War II in order to see some of the death that scientists have used to prove their private theories. The obvious example for the Western World involves the death camps of Nazi Germany, where doctors took advantage of the human chattel in order to perform some of the most heinous experiments on the human body ever recorded by Man. Some of those experiments were innocuous, such as seeing if they could change the color of a child's hair and eye color, but there were serious explorations of human anatomy using living people. Nanking is just as infamous, with its infamous explorations into such areas as how long people could survive in the cold, among others.
Those experiments were not limited to the labs of evil foreign scientists. Consider how the lives of the Tuskegee airmen were affected because someone was curious about how black soldiers were affected by syphillis. Whereas the logic is understandable (black physiological systems respond differently to a wide variety of diseases, most notable the relationship between malaria and sickle-cell anemia), the experiments were nonetheless barbaric. That of course discounts the wholesale experimentation when it came to figuring out the effects of nuclear bombs on the human body, where soldiers were asked to lay down as nuclear warheads were exploded near them in order to determine the effects on their bodies.
More recently is the unfortunately successful work of Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield published a report on how the MMR vaccine was the cause of autism. Although the report has been thoroughly discredited and you'll please note that there was no "Doctor" before Wakefield's name as he has been stripped of that particular honor, the damage has been done; diseases that were on the run have been seen in increased numbers and those diseases have been causing deaths. Although there had been deaths due to vaccinations, they were far fewer than the near-epidemics among those that have not been vaccinated. Wakefield has not recanted his position by any stretch, making his personal theory responsible for thousands of deaths as the anti-vaxers take up his cause.
This is not to say that Science should be cast aside by any stretch, as it is obviously a major force for good in our modern civilization. However, we do need to realize that few things come without cost, and that occasionally people screw up in disastrous ways. We just need to stop letting memes think for us and pay attention; The Bible says that there will be those that attempt to lead people astray, and memes are as good a tool to do so. So enjoy the memes, but remember that you do have your own judgment that should be used every so often...
You only need to go as far back as World War II in order to see some of the death that scientists have used to prove their private theories. The obvious example for the Western World involves the death camps of Nazi Germany, where doctors took advantage of the human chattel in order to perform some of the most heinous experiments on the human body ever recorded by Man. Some of those experiments were innocuous, such as seeing if they could change the color of a child's hair and eye color, but there were serious explorations of human anatomy using living people. Nanking is just as infamous, with its infamous explorations into such areas as how long people could survive in the cold, among others.
Those experiments were not limited to the labs of evil foreign scientists. Consider how the lives of the Tuskegee airmen were affected because someone was curious about how black soldiers were affected by syphillis. Whereas the logic is understandable (black physiological systems respond differently to a wide variety of diseases, most notable the relationship between malaria and sickle-cell anemia), the experiments were nonetheless barbaric. That of course discounts the wholesale experimentation when it came to figuring out the effects of nuclear bombs on the human body, where soldiers were asked to lay down as nuclear warheads were exploded near them in order to determine the effects on their bodies.
More recently is the unfortunately successful work of Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield published a report on how the MMR vaccine was the cause of autism. Although the report has been thoroughly discredited and you'll please note that there was no "Doctor" before Wakefield's name as he has been stripped of that particular honor, the damage has been done; diseases that were on the run have been seen in increased numbers and those diseases have been causing deaths. Although there had been deaths due to vaccinations, they were far fewer than the near-epidemics among those that have not been vaccinated. Wakefield has not recanted his position by any stretch, making his personal theory responsible for thousands of deaths as the anti-vaxers take up his cause.
This is not to say that Science should be cast aside by any stretch, as it is obviously a major force for good in our modern civilization. However, we do need to realize that few things come without cost, and that occasionally people screw up in disastrous ways. We just need to stop letting memes think for us and pay attention; The Bible says that there will be those that attempt to lead people astray, and memes are as good a tool to do so. So enjoy the memes, but remember that you do have your own judgment that should be used every so often...
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