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| Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Tearing down walls > Where the heck is the Western civilization going? | Forum Quick Jump
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hand_carved
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 111
| Posted 11/13/2002 10:58 AM (GMT -6) |   | Dang it! I can't get the picture to work! You just put the link between [ img] and [ /img], right (except without spaces)?
"I'm beside myself!" C-3PO, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 11/13/2002 11:40 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Dang it! I can't get the picture to work! You just put the link between [ img] and [ /img], right (except without spaces)?
Some sites protect their images, either for copywrite and commercial protection reasons, OR to keep the volume of traffic down (which might cost them.)
Put the COOL pictures URL here for us, and let us click on it!
Al | | Back to Top | | |
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hand_carved
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Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 111
| Posted 11/13/2002 12:05 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 11/13/2002 1:57 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 11/13/2002 2:00 PM (GMT -6) | | | WORKED. When I "right button clicked" and selected "show picture" THEN it came up on both my post and yours, hand carved. I think THAT means that it is on a slooooowww server, and my AOL gives up on it too soon. But REFRESHING by doing what I described above asked my computer to respond to the data that had actually, and eventually gotten here. | | Back to Top | | |
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BJS
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 2001
Total Posts : 587
| Posted 11/14/2002 10:51 AM (GMT -6) | | Thought some of you on this thread might enjoy this. . .
Would Jesus drive a gas guzzling SUV?
By The Associated Press
(11/13/02 - Raleigh, North Carolina) — New car buyers in four states will soon hear a call to conscience, amid the low-interest finance offers and year-end sales.
The Evangelical Environmental Network wants new-car buyers to consider: What would Jesus drive?
The group is urging people to park their sport-utility vehicles and buy more fuel-efficient cars to protect the environment.
The group's executive director -- the Reverend Jim Ball -- says Christians are called to preserve the created world. He says global warming and smoggy air threaten the health of humans, plants and animals worldwide.
His group will begin running television ads this month in selected cities in North Carolina, Iowa, Indiana and Missouri.
(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Brett
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hand_carved
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Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 111
| Posted 11/14/2002 3:48 PM (GMT -6) | | Veddy interesting, Brett. Thank you.
"I'm beside myself!" C-3PO, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. | | Back to Top | | |
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honorman
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Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 11/15/2002 8:46 PM (GMT -6) | | Hey Shell: wanted to drop a line on you about a question you had: why are children vaccinated for Hep. B? Asked my wife about it.
Part of it is convenience> Statistics show that many teenagers become sexually active and will get the disease in their teen years. It is easier to do it when they are young and the vaccination is one of the safest around. We could, as my wife says, wait until they are teenagers and ask if they are going to be sexually active but...many won't admit to such things and the disease will spread.
Also, it prevents mothers from giving it to their babies. Plus, in poor sections of cities it can easily be spread by cuts on hands, etc. So it is basically a preventive measure.
I would like to make a comment on the whole issue of vaccinations by bringing up a comment my wife made. It is important to check everything out but, ultimately you have to look at the success (or failure) of vaccinations by comparing them to countries who don't have them. Children die everyday in poor countries from things we prevent with a shot. Yes, children have been harmed by some vaccinations. But the benefits have far outweighed the harms. Ask those who went through polio. And the polio vaccine isn't even one of the safest.
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 11/16/2002 2:57 AM (GMT -6) | | I work at a special ed. school. Every year I get myt flue shot. i have my Hep-B shots too.
So, say there is blood on the floor. You use "universal precautions." That means you assume and act like that blood has AIDs and Hep-B and everything else.
We have a complex society, with lots of travel. Like how New World people met lethal challenge in Old World diseases; and visaversa. | | Back to Top | | |
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shell
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 280
| Posted 11/17/2002 7:16 AM (GMT -6) | | Honorman and Al,
As I have indicated before, in all actuality each parent just needs to be true to their beliefs and seek information on their own, look into family history of allergies, hyperactivity, autism, and vaccine reactions, what the potential risks are, and then do the best they can in making what they feel to be the best possible decision for their family.
In the whole scope of life and theology etc. this is a pretty small issue isn't it?
Thanks for the interaction,
Shell
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honorman
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Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 11/17/2002 1:11 PM (GMT -6) | | Shell: a final point. In California, there is no law making a person vaccinate your child for anything. You simply must sign a wager saying you are against it.
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hand_carved
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Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 111
| Posted 11/17/2002 3:58 PM (GMT -6) | | Old World & New World diseases...
Very true. People in third world countries build up all kinds of resistance to things that we don't, because they are exposed to them. It's just a way of life to them. We are all going to die in some way. Today in the West, it is usually either from heart disease/failure, cancer, or an accident of some kind. What is interesting is that much heart disease is from the stressful lives that we live so that we can avoid being an underdeveloped nation that has to be exposed to all these other diseases (malaria, dysentarry [sp?], etc.). We exchange malaria for heart failure, depression, AD/HD, anxiety disorder, stress disorder, and any other number of psychological aberrations.
I'm not saying that we should can the medical field all together, I'm just saying that we put way too much emphasis on it, as if it is going to answer all of our problems. Fact is, it's not, and we don't have to be busting our butts trying to try to come up with these other "cures" and stuff if it means that we sacrifice meaningful relationships while we're at it.
We're essentially making ourselves pansies. I can say that because I'm a pansy. I'm dependant upon so many little machines and everything. I'm one of the "intellegensia" that has to depend upon the working class for everything. THat's pathetic. You know, I seriously think that one day we're going to run out of fossil fuels and other resources that we're consumming like there's no tomorrow, and some "dumb" barbarian nation that is not dependant upon all of these technological gizmos is going to come wipe the U.S. out, like Atilla. It's scary, but that's what will happen, I bet...that is unless the A.I. wipe us out first...or else unless terrorist get ahold of major advanced nanotechnology and create nanomachines to reproduce themselves and destroy the whole of all their enemies.
We can say, "Oh, Jesus is going to come back before then." But this is bunk. Sure I hope and pray that he does, but every generation for the last 2000 years has been thinking that they would be the ones to see him coming in the clouds.
Okay, I'll stop now. Ha!
Blessings...
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honorman
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Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 11/17/2002 7:31 PM (GMT -6) | | We may exchange one for the another, but we outlive those in other countries by at least 30 years. Plus, infants and children die from things there that are easily cured here. Too much emphasis on the medical field. Ha! Not in the right areas I say. We should be educating people to care for themselves and we have over used many drugs. But your comparsion with third countries is simply untrue. They are dying of diseases that we use to die from. They are dying from things we easily have the cure for. And even if we are trading for heart attacks we are still outliving other countries because of the medical breakthroughs our country has had. What you are basically doing is comparing apples and oranges...
I agree with you in some small ways but, again, you're overgeneralizing.
Edited by - honorman on 11/18/2002 12:32:28 AM | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 11/18/2002 1:38 AM (GMT -6) | | 
Does this mean that the guys in the dorm should stop growing penicillin in their soxs under their beds?
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hand_carved
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Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 111
| Posted 11/18/2002 3:00 AM (GMT -6) | | hm,
I'm not overgeneralizing, I'm just making a general point. There is a difference. Overgeneralization would be to say that we should do away with the medical field because it is worthless. My whole point is to not go to one extreme or the other (i.e., overgeneralizing).
In general, though, I'm saying that the basic mindset that gives us the vaccine for polio also gives us heart disease and other countless psychological disorders, as well as deteriorates relationships in the name of "progress." It makes us progressively more dependant not upon God and His creation but on our own machines and creations. Eventually, we'll have machines or robots that will completely demolish the need of a working class of humans, and the foundation of our existence will be non-human robots. WHat will the working class do then? And what happens when we run out of energy sources for these extremely high energy demands? Our foundation will crumble, and we (in the advanced western civilizations) will have to start out again from ground zero. Meanwhile, other countries who haven't made themselves so dependent upon machines, computers, and robotics will be far more "advanced" than we will because their foundation will not be shaken. And they will have the power to come take the previously "superior" nations over without difficulty. Who knows how far ahead in time this will take place, but it will. That's just the way historical pendelum swings.
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hand_carved
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Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 111
| Posted 11/18/2002 3:40 AM (GMT -6) | | Oh, and (just to ask some hard questions) what is the intrinsic good of longer life on earth anyway, if that means detriments in many other ways (not to mention prolonged toil in the flesh when an eternal reunion with the Father awaits us)? More people living in retirement, more people under governmental health programs for the elderly… Essentially, the ratio of people living on SS to people in the work force will increase making it a much more incredible burden for those in the work force. When you combine that with the idea of a working class becoming just another “unnecessary burden” for humanity, you end up with a great mass of gratuitous human flesh. And then the earth runs out of resources. There is only so much land for people to live on. We keep prolonging death, what does that do but lead to a massive over-population of overly consumptive people? What is the logical end of that?
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honorman
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Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 11/19/2002 5:23 AM (GMT -6) | | How each culture lives (stress, heart attacks, etc.) is not the same as to whether or not vaccinations are good or bad. Different topics, different applications. You are overgeneralizing. Regardless, I don't think bemourning the bad things in life to the exclusion of the good things is what God had in mind. Balance in all things...
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hand_carved
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Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 111
| Posted 11/19/2002 8:58 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
How each culture lives (stress, heart attacks, etc.) is not the same as to whether or not vaccinations are good or bad. Different topics, different applications. You are overgeneralizing.
Don't be silly. How a civilization lives determines whether or not they makes advances such as vaccinations. Time is a limited quanity. If you dedicate time to the study of vaccinations, you subtract time spent doing other things.
quote:
Regardless, I don't think bemourning the bad things in life to the exclusion of the good things is what God had in mind. Balance in all things...
Balance is the issue I've been talking about this whole time!!! A thing is only "good" if it is balanced according to God's will. Understanding and study of the scriptures is good, but if one ONLY studies and does not APPLY what he has learned, it is meaningless.
In this same way, if a civilization that is having its needs met and then a "good" comes along that makes life a little "easier" for them... if a "good" brings about the presence of an equal or greater "evil," is it truly "good"? Nuclear technology cuts both ways - incredible source of energy, but it is also something that can entirely destroy the planet. Before the invention of nuclear technology, it would have been impossible to destroy the entire planet so easily.
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BJS
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 2001
Total Posts : 587
| Posted 12/2/2002 4:48 AM (GMT -6) | | Thought you all might enjoy an article on vaccination from this weekend's New York Times. Shell, you might find this particularly interesting.
_______________________________________________________________
November 30, 2002
When Parents Say No to Child Vaccinations
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
VASHON ISLAND, Wash. — Kate Packard, the school nurse here, has a nightmare she sums up in five words: "measles coming across the water."
If measles did make the 20-minute ferry ride across Puget Sound from Seattle — hardly unthinkable, since a case occurred last year near a ferry terminal in West Seattle — public health officers say the whole Vashon Island school district could be shut down until the island's last case disappeared or an emergency vaccination drive took effect.
Eighteen percent of Vashon Island's 1,600 primary school students have legally opted out of vaccination against childhood diseases, including polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, hepatitis B and chicken pox. The island is a counterculture haven where therapies like homeopathy and acupuncture are popular, and where some cite health problems among neighbors' children that they attribute to vaccinations.
Most families opting out of vaccination here have obtained "philosophical exemptions" from normal vaccination requirements — exemptions that in Washington and several other states, including California and Colorado, can be claimed simply by signing a school form.
Across the country, about 1 percent of all children are exempt from vaccination, said Dr. Walter A. Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency's surveys suggest that more than 90 percent of all American children have had most shots, except for the new chicken-pox vaccine.
But from Vashon Island to Boulder, Colo., to towns in Missouri and Massachusetts, there are "hot spots" where many children go unprotected. In a 1999 survey, 11 states reported increases in exemptions.
Clusters of unvaccinated children are not only in potential danger themselves, health officials say, but are also a threat to the "herd immunity" that walls out epidemics, sheltering fetuses, infants too young to be immunized, old people with weakened immune systems and even vaccinated classmates who remain at risk because no vaccine is 100 percent effective.
When only a few parents use "herd immunity" to let their children escape the small risks of vaccination, the system still works.
But health officials become concerned in states like California, where it is easier for a parent to sign the waiver form than to have a child vaccinated. "People take the path of least resistance," said Daniel A. Salmon, a vaccination expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. "What I do to my child can put other children at risk." In 1989-90, measles broke out among unimmunized immigrant children in Southern California, causing 43,000 cases and 101 deaths.
Vaccine resisters cite an array of reasons. "Sometimes it's distrust in government, feeling it's in bed with the vaccine industry and `everyone's making money off our kids,' " Mr. Salmon said. Sometimes the objections are religious, as among Christian Scientists and some Amish congregations. Sometimes a community is scared when a child is truly harmed by side effects; the live polio vaccine, for example, is thought to cause about eight deaths a year.
Some parents are upset at the sheer number of injections a child must get — usually about 20 by age 2. Others are convinced — despite evidence to the contrary — that vaccines are highly likely to cause severe health problems, like seizures and autism.
Here on Vashon Island, a community of 10,000, word spread quickly when the 10-month-old baby of Gail O'Grady, a midwife who also works at Minglement Natural Foods, died unexpectedly in his crib in 1984 two weeks after his first immunization; when Pam Beck's daughter Rachel suffered four years of seizures that began minutes after her first whooping-cough shot; when Nancy Soriano's son, Alex, developed autism after tetanus and polio vaccinations.
Some doctors they consulted disagreed, but all three mothers were sure vaccines were to blame.
Alex, Ms. Soriano said, changed from "a bright-eyed, happy, beautiful kid" to a severely autistic 4-year-old who "lived curled up in a ball, screaming and screaming and screaming." She says she has nearly cured him by removing milk and glutens from his diet.
Public health specialists suggest that the resistance to vaccines is a consequence of the success of vaccinations: People, they say, no longer fear diseases they have never seen.
"I remember how the fear of polio changed our lives — not going to the swimming pool in summer, not going to the movies, not getting involved with crowds," said Dr. Edward P. Rothstein, 60, a Pennsylvania pediatrician who helps the American Academy of Pediatrics make immunization recommendations. "I remember pictures of wards full of iron lungs, hundreds in a room, with kids who couldn't breathe in them. It affected daily life more than AIDS does today."
Now, with the rare side effects of the live vaccine, "there's a risk of about eight kids a year dying, so people don't want to be vaccinated," he said, adding, "When polio was around, people gladly took that risk."
Rubella, Dr. Rothstein went on, "is, for the most part, a nothing disease" — the reason to keep vaccinating against it is to protect fetuses. "In the 1960's," he said, "50,000 to 60,000 babies were born with small heads, or deaf, or blind or with cataracts" because their pregnant mothers had been exposed to rubella.
All 50 states allow medical exemptions for children who are immuno-compromised or allergic to vaccines; 47 states — all but Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia — allow religious exemptions; and 17 allow personal or philosophical ones. But how many children receive the exemptions depends partly on how much red tape is involved, a study in the American Journal of Public Health found. In states where parents must go to a state office for exemption forms, get their signatures notarized or produce letters from a religious authority, exemption rates tend to be lower.
The only states with exemption rates greater than 2 percent, the disease center said, are Michigan, Washington and Wisconsin.
Still, health officials say that in recent years public sentiment has often run against vaccination. The news media publicize stories of autism, seizures and crib death that followed vaccination. More than a dozen Internet sites specialize in describing the dangers of vaccines.
Vashon Island is both a commuters' haven served by high-speed ferries to Seattle and a home to the counterculture — a place where the telephone company's garage features a mural of a Frisbee-catching dog. Millionaires have shore homes while the self-named Rainbow People live in tents in the woods.
In interviews, parents who have signed forms to exempt their children from vaccination appeared to be educated, attuned to their children's health and full of opinions about vaccines, though some cited "facts" that the disease center disputes. Most parents mixed unconventional therapies like homeopathy, acupuncture and chiropractic, and conventional medicines like antibiotics and painkillers, Most said they were suspicious of the vaccine industry.
"I consider well-baby care to be a capitalist plot," Maryam Steffen, a mother of four said only half-kidding.
If anyone would seem to be a living argument for tetanus vaccination, it is Camille Borst, 25. When she was 12, she stepped on a nail. Her mother, who opposes vaccination, did not take her to a hospital until her foot was so inflamed she could not stand on it. But Ms. Borst says proudly that she has not immunized her own children, Deven, 9, or Casper, 4.
Her mother, Adrienne Forest, 47, who is home-schooling her grandchildren in a neat, shingled mobile home in a clearing of fir and alder trees, said she was sorry she let the hospital give Camille other vaccines. "It was a moment of weakness," she said. The nurses who angrily told her that Camille could have died "totally freaked me out," she said.
From 1995 to 1999, said Ms. Packard, the school nurse, an epidemic here of whooping cough, which can be fatal in infants, hospitalized some infants and left some children with chronic asthma. Ms. Forest's grandson Deven had whooping cough two years ago and, she conceded, probably passed the disease to 10 other children, including an infant.
"Yeah, that bothered me," Ms. Forest said. "But I called everybody and we studied up on what you can do to build up the immune system."
The baby "did just fine," she said. "On Vashon Island, you have middle-class people who eat healthy and keep warm. If everyone was poor-poor, not breast-fed, not eating right — that might be a reason to vaccinate." But she and her daughter remain steadfastly opposed.
Meg White, 45, though, now somewhat regrets not vaccinating. Three years ago, her whole family, including her infant son Julian, had whooping cough "really, really bad" for more than three months.
"My son would turn all shades of purple," she said. "He stopped breathing several times and we took him to the hospital. My daughter was terrified of going to sleep because then it got worse. She would vomit all over the place. My husband cracked ribs from coughing."
Now, Ms. White said, she would advise other mothers to vaccinate against whooping cough, polio and tetanus, but only with the newest vaccines. She still has not vaccinated Julian, now 3, against measles, mumps, rubella or chicken pox.
Julian is in nursery school at Puddlestompers, whose director, Tressa Aspiri, also changed her mind about not vaccinating after her older children got whooping cough.
She makes no recommendations to parents when they fill out the school's vaccination form, she said, though she feels that vaccines are safer than they were when her children were born in the mid-1980's.
"I still feel strongly that it's the parents' choice," Ms. Aspiri said.
Brett
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hand_carved
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Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 111
| Posted 12/2/2002 7:11 AM (GMT -6) | | Thanks for the article.
I came across this in a study I'm doing on Lewis' Space Trilogy.
Apparenty, according to the Zondervan Lewis Encyclopedia entry on "Technology," a number of historians of science (including Stanley L. Jaki) have shown that the scientific revolution reached the "critical mass" necessary to bear fruit in practical inventions by the beginning of the 18th century.
...furthering my notion that the technological advances we are making are only as much destructive as they are productive.
I also discovered that in Lewis' Abolition of Man (I think it is...) he speaks of how applied science is not really much (if any) different than sorcery or magic in that we manipulate toward our desired ends. Abolition of man is full of stuff on this topic.
On another note, in Perelandra (and Out of the Silent Planet) a recurring them is that of "having pleasures over again." Ransom finds this gourd which gives him incomprehensible ecstacy, but he feels it would be profane to eat another just for the sake of having that pleasure again. The islands float according to the will of Maleldil, and it is sin to stay on the fixed land to where you can control your own fate.
Ransom wonders if this desire to have pleasures over again at will is the root of all evil. [paraphrase] "No," he says, "The love of money is." But then he considers, "but why do we love money if not to have pleasures and escape pains as we so desire?"
What is applied science if anything but a manipulation to have pleasures over and escape pains as we so desire?
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