What Fundamentalists and Scientists may have in common.

What could a fundamentalist and a scientist have in common? Both build barriers around their conclusions and refuse to consider anything else. You may have noticed that the media usually place fundamentalists in the spotlight and focus on their close-mindedness. However, I just finished reading a great article in BBC’s Science Focus (Issue 282 / July 2015; p. 23) by Robert Matthews -- How a `crackpot’ theory has just been proved correct. Matthews puts scientists in the spotlight. Below are quotes from the article (highlights added).

Back in 1915, Alfred Wegener published The Origin of Continents and Oceans, in which he presented evidence for what is now called plate tectonics. He hoped the book would spark interest among geologists. Instead, they seized on the obvious flaw in the idea: how can continent sized slabs of rock slide around the Earth?

Now the mystery has been solved – and it turns out Wegener was on the right track. Using controlled explosions to trigger seismic echoes from deep within the Earth, a team of researchers in New Zealand has recently found that the plates of rock making up the crust sit atop pools of slippery, melted rock around 70-80km down. So it seems that Wegener wasn’t so crazy after all.

What the new findings, published in Nature, really show is the danger of dismissing a theory just because it doesn’t fit with current knowledge. This Is the Argument from Omniscience: the assumption that just because we don’t have an explanation, it means no-one will find one, ever.

That sounds like arrogance to the point of lunacy. Yet you’ll find plenty of otherwise rational people wheeling it out to dismiss ideas that they don’t like, such as   homeopathy. . .

But I can think of a host of intriguing theories in everything from cancer therapy to cosmology that keep running into the Argument from Omniscience: science cannot currently explain them, so it never will.

There are better rules for judging new theories. For example, Ockham’s Razor says -- the more assumptions a theory makes, the less likely it is to be valid.

And science popularizer Carl Sagan advocated another rule of thumb -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

These rules are not always easy to apply, but they do have a solid basis in the mathematics of evidence – which the Argument from Omniscience doesn’t.

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Jim Myers

How Violent Video Games Really Affect Kids

Greg Toppo’s article -- How Violent Video Games Really Affect Kids -- in the July/August 2015 issue (p. 40), focuses on a question that has been debated for decades. Toppo closes the article with a statement by media scholar Henry Jenkins that is well worth your consideration.

They concluded that any negative behavioral effects playing violent games might have are more than offset because violent people are drawn to such games, and the more they play, the less time they have for crime.

Even if violent video games are not turning people into killers, we might still wonder if they are harming our kids in subtler ways. As psychologist Douglas Α. Gentile of Iowa State University puts it,     whatever we practice repeatedly affects brain. If we practice aggressive ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, then we will get better at those.” In a 2008 survey on the gaming habits of about 2,500 young people, Gentile and his father, psychologist J. Ronald Gentile, found that children and adolescents who played more violent games were likelier to report “aggressive cognitions and behaviors.” They concluded that violent video games “appear to be exemplary teachers of aggression.”

The greatest worry is the impact on children who are already at risk.

“Media is most powerful in our lives when it reinforces our existing values.”

(media scholar Henry Jenkins)

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Jim Myers

Citizenship Returns & the Returns are TOV!

In this week's Parade Magazine there was an article called, "Operation Good Citizen: How we're teaching kids to do the right thing.”  When I was in elementary school, there was a class on citizenship. It disappeared from the curriculum for decades and is now it’s returning in the 2015 version. A fitting definition from Webster's is, "The quality of an individual's response to membership in a community."

A number of schools across the country are participating in programs like the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation's character development program. These courses teach essential values of character education -- from creating a caring school community and providing students with opportunities for moral actions to engaging families and community members in the character-building efforts.

In one school, all children K-8 are assigned to one of 46 "school families" that include teachers, custodians, secretaries and administrators. These groups meet regularly, sometimes eat lunch together and do team building activities. The students remain with these "families" all through school. It gives them opportunities to build relationships with other students and adults. One principal said, "There's something palpable here when you walk into our building. The school's CORE VALUES of RESPECT, RESPONSIBILITY and CARING are tied to everything we do."

Those CORE VALUES were the result of months of CONVERSATIONS between TEACHERS, STUDENTS, PARENTS, BOARD MEMBERS and COMMUNITY MEMBERS. They all came to a CONSENSUS on the VALUES THEY WANTED TO BUILD EVERYTHING ELSE AROUND!

This is the ESSENCE OF TOV – helping people create VALUES-BASED RELATIONSHIPS on SHARED CORE VALUES and working together to solve problems and meet the needs of the common good.

Kids need and want someone to tell them it's OK to do the right thing. A student in a New Jersey school developed a "Do the Right Thing App", which recognizes and applauds good behavior. Many of these programs also include teaching and mentoring the qualities of Leadership. A number of schools saw a drop in violence, vandalism, weapons and substance abuse. Fights were down 84% as well as harassment and bullying. Attendance, grades and SATs were all up. 

When CORE VALUES Protect Life, Preserve Life, Make Life more Functional and Increase the Quality of Life, the returns are TOV!  These are the Citizens I want peopling my world. What do you think?

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Be Empowered & Do TOV!

Rabbi Jeffrey Leynor