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Australian Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Doherty sees no inherent contradiction between religion and science, a view likewise espoused even by Galileo. Despite this, many lesser scientific minds, especially of the media-tart “pop-sci” variety, seem to imagine that it’s their scientific mission statement to attack and disparage religion.
Or, at least, certain religions.
Dress religion in a cassock and these small-brained zealots will happily dance on its grave. But dress religion in a grass skirt or a bit of ochre, and suddenly there’s no end of outlandish woo-woo that the “intelligentsia” won’t bow to.
University science lecturers have been warned off making the familiar statement in class that “Aboriginal people have been in Australia for 40,000 years”.
The [University of NSW language advice for staff] document suggests it is “more appropriate” to say Aborigines have been here “since the beginning of the Dreaming/s” because this “reflects the beliefs of many Indigenous Australians that they have always been in Australia, from the beginning of time, and came from the land’’.
Some people believe they came from dust somewhere in the Middle-East, some 6,000 years ago. Others believe they come from the souls of people buried in volcanos and killed with hydrogen bombs 75 million years ago, by the dictator of the Galactic Confederacy, Xenu. Should these also be taught in university science classes?
As usual, this nonsensical gibberish is dressed up in the lying snake-oil of “inclusion”.
The guidelines say: “Recognise that intentional or unintentional racist, classist, homophobic, ableist, ill-informed and/or disparaging comments or content can be harmful or damaging to students from minority identities.
“In the case that a student calls out your use of non-inclusive language, avoid being defensive. Acknowledge it, and reflect on how you might ensure inclusivity.”
Or just tell them to harden up and remember that they’re in a university science class, not a drum circle.
The indigenous language advice says putting a date on Aboriginal arrival “tends to lend support to migration theories and anthropological assumptions’’.
“Many indigenous Australians see this sort of measurement and quantifying as inappropriate’’…Last year a UNSW science faculty research centre said…“Many Aboriginal Australians would say with conviction that they have always been here.”
Some people will also say with great conviction that the Earth is flat. “Conviction” doesn’t make anyone right.
It soon becomes obvious that the motivation behind this idiotic pandering is grubby politics.
University of Wollongong archaeologist Richard Fullagar said…“Current scientific evidence indicates that the first Aboriginal groups in Australia came from islands to the north and ultimately (like all of us) from modern human dispersals out of Africa with subsequent genetic mixing.
“It is true that migrations of people from other places contradict the idea that Aboriginal people have always been in Australia but I don’t think this creates such a conflict that migration theories are objectionable in the sense that they have to be offensive.”
Danish DNA scientist Eske Willerslev, of Cambridge University, said…“Scientists can potentially damage the standing of the elders, or the right to land claims, should our findings contradict the oral traditions.”
theaustralian
In a famous scene from the film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Nelson Miles confronts Sitting Bull and disputes the Sioux’s claims that they had always occupied their land courtesy of the Great Spirit: “How very convenient to cloak your claims in spiritualism.” When Sitting Bull is offended by Miles’ recounting of the long history of bloodshed and conquest by Native Americans, Miles retorts, “This is the truth! Not legend.”
There is strong archaeological evidence that the human occupation of Australia took place with waves of settlement by different groups: “invasion”, in other words. The evidence also shows that pre-European Australia was a shockingly violent place, not least for women and children.
That, as Miles would say, is the truth, not fanciful legends, however sincerely held.
This push to bury science under a suffocating cloak of myth and superstition is every bit as damaging to the pursuit of truth as any Inquisition or Lysenkoist denunciation. It’s nothing more than Creationism in blackface.
