Russia’s science and higher education ministry has dismissed the head of a prestigious genetics institute who sparked controversy by contending that humans once lived for centuries and that the shorter lives of modern humans are due to their ancestors’ sins, state news agency RIA-Novosti said Thursday.
Although the report did not give a reason for the firing of Alexander Kudryavtsev, the influential Russian Orthodox Church called it religious discrimination.
Kudryavtsev, who headed the Russian Academy of Science’s Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, made a presentation at a conference in 2023 in which he said people had lived for some 900 years prior to the era of the Biblical Flood and that “original, ancestral and personal sins” caused genetic diseases that shortened lifespans.
They don’t necessarily contradict each other (except for fundamentalist).
My understanding of religion is that the religion brings answer to the question “Why ?”, the science on the other hand answer the question “How ?”
Science will explain how human life appeared on earth but not why human life appears.
Religion is one way to answer why are we here and should we do with our life. I don’t necessarily agree with it but I could understand the appeal for some people.
It’s more to do with religion falling apart when you apply the scientific method. And if you don’t, what kinda scientist are you?
Thelemite here—we do apply the scientific method to our religion. Every Thelemite is advised to keep a journal and study the results of their efforts in life to discover their true purpose and how to pursue it. We also create experiments to find ways to have more control over ourselves and our world.
The problem is that even people who use the scientific method can fall prey to bad practices and confirmation bias. That’s why it isn’t a bad idea for both science and religion to be peer reviewed.
You know it just doesn’t work. Psychology, psychiatric medicine, sociology, law, game theory. Religion lost the monopoly on how the universe operates and claims to know how humans should operate. The more we learn the less it got correct.
We know that some people are medically better off presenting as a different gender than what they were born with. We know that some people prefer the same sex and that this is common among animals that are like us. We know that the fear of hell doesn’t motivate people to be more empathetic, just look at crime statistics in religious areas vs non-religious areas. We know a society that doesn’t charge interest on loans has no credit system that works. We know that physically beating a child that misbehaves does not correct the behavior. We know that the wealth level of a society depends almost completely with the degree that women can work.
And to a degree none of this should be surprising. Religion is a selfish meme. It doesn’t exist for our benefit it exists for its own. So of course religious societies do worse, their parasite is thriving.