Biologist Richard Dawkins has recently come under fire for his observation that Maori myths are not actually science. Nonetheless, the New Zealand government seems determined to treat them as a useful tool for determining facts of reality on par with the scientific method.
To grasp government intentions requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori. Since only 2 per cent of New Zealanders (and only 5 per cent of Māoris) speak that language, this again looks like self-righteous virtue-signalling, bending a knee to that modish version of Original Sin which is white guilt.
New Zealand children will be taught the true wonder of DNA, while being simultaneously confused by the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father.
And just how useful is such “traditional knowledge”? Apparently it resulted in the discovery that woven bassinets can prevent sudden infant death.
Not so dissimilar from those of us in the west being taught science alongside the anti-science of evolution, global warming, and viruses and vaccines.
And “traditional aboriginal knowledge” dressed up as science. All part of the same fraud.
These knowledge systems, which include mātauranga Māori, have evolved over many thousands of years, to maintain the sustainability of wellbeing of Indigenous peoples
I don’t speak Māori … nor English evidently … because I haven’t the slightest idea what that sentence means. “… to maintain the sustainability of wellbeing…”. Huh?!
Were the Maori like American and canadian indians, stoneage peoples with no written language and no wheel? There really is no where to go with this stupidity.
Worse. Pre stone age. Because they are an equatorial people … they didn’t struggle against nature for survival. No need for a nomadic existence, or elaborate weaponry … or much clothing. I don’t believe the Maori advanced beyond nicely carved clubs. Nope. Just layin on the beach fornicating, murdering neighboring tribespeople and impregnating their girls.
But Paul Gauguin sure lapped it up … so to speak
In Ontario, it’s called TEK. Traditional Ecological Knowledge. By policy, TEK must be incorporated into the decision making process when the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) changes or brings in new legislation and regulations.
Yeah.
The common cold, influenza, the Black Death, all lies, none of it ever happened.
Oh, and the Earth is flat.
And to think I used to laugh at those who claim “Jedi” as a religion.
I mean…microcloridians or whatever they call “The Force” has about as much science behind it.
The Supreme Court of Canada decided a landmark, essential case on Canada’s constitutional laws based almost entirely on Native – Indian – Aboriginal “oral history”.
So let’s not insult the New Zealanders too much, we got our stupid before they got theirs, at least on “believing made up bullshit”.
Add to that, Canadian Courts endorsing the use of traditional healing for aboriginal children if the parents say that it is what they want. From 2014:
“The Grand Council Chief of the Union of Ontario Indians is applauding the Friday decision of the Ontario Court of Justice, which ruled that a hospital couldn’t force a First Nations girl from the Six Nations community to take chemotherapy. The girl, known as J.J., and her mother, D.H., have opted to use traditional medicines to treat the 11-year-old’s acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ending her chemotherapy treatment 10 days into the 32-day course this August. ”
https://www.manitoulin.com/ontario-supreme-court-establishes-supremacy-aboriginal-parents-choose-childrens-medical-treatments/
I don’t have a problem with First Nations declining medical treatment.
The problem comes when the family of the deceased then sues the government for not providing proper medical care.
So … the First Nations are just as idiotic as Steve Jobs who eschewed modern medicine for … ahem … alternative … treatment of his deadliest of all cancers. Job’s shaman was some mystic Hindu nonsense … Healing through Yoga and positive thoughts. Which always surprises me … because the Hindu mysticism has created one hell of a shtihole country … Job’s body should have been floated in the Ganges in a floral bed, eh?
“Oral history”… aka “Chinese whispers”… “Russian scandal”… “broken telephone”… “the messenger game”… “hearsay”.
So let me get this straight: The woke fanatics dismiss Christianity and its tale of creation as “fake”, but are quick to embrace the mythology of another culture as “scientific”?
Makes sense, if you are an ideologically driven nutcase who engages in hardcore doublethink.
Christian influence and Christian results are far more dangerous to leftists than the matter in the Bible.
Who gave the world hospitals, libraries, the study of genetics, universities and bodies of art, literature and music?
I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t the “knowledge keepers” who talk to rocks.
Well … I’ll give the natives THIS. At least they believed in some sort of a Creator-god, unlike the contemporary self-appointed gods of “science” who condemn us to death with their arrogant stupidity.
Better to worship a rock … than to worship ones self. Which begets mutilating and MAIDing ones self … because GOD “made a mistake”.
Not a vast difference, if you ask me.
Romantic snot and drivel … to be sucked up by drips.
The only difference with Canada is the name of the indigenous tribes. We now have faculties in the professoriate with chairs for indigenous knowledge, professions where practitioners are compelled to take continuing education in such, a school system where history is brown-washed, ubiquitous land acknowledgements, cancelling for objectors, and an SCOC that has ruled up expectations that we are all on stolen lands.
When you evacuate reason, history, and critical thinking, IOW institutionalize nihilism, its easy to refill with absurdities.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” – Voltaire
One thing we can say John, is that the supreme court is SUPREMELY STUPID. Fits right in, the are canadian after all eh.
It may well be that some folk medicines of the Maori are effective, just as some European and North American medicines were. As an example, willow bark was known to eleviate headaches, and the leaves and bark of certain trees cured scurvy.
But that does not mean they were practicing science.
The Greeks also knew of the secret of willow bark as well.
Well, yes it does. A primitive form of science that tries to connect cause and effect, and one without the typical safeguards against confirmation bias and the various ways correlation can be confused with causation, but it’s science nonetheless.
Leave us not forget that the ancient Greeks who gave us the US Constitution and the concept of participatory democracy also gave us the thoroughly bullshit four humours theory of disease, which persisted well into the Renaissance era.
The issue is not whether they were practicing science then, but whether we’re going to preserve their traditions in amber for all time and pretend that they can’t be improved. Willow bark tea cures headaches because it contains salicylic acid, but salicylic acid will give you bleeding stomach ulcers. Washing it with acetone produces acetylsalicylic acid – aspirin – which doesn’t.
well known in Europe too. the original aspirin
willow bark treatments had a good likelihood of travelling across the Bering strait . its that old
The value of myths and legends, and religion, is in stories to pass on virtues and morals.
You can make a sure bet that they are not going to consult the Maori traditions that say there are two genders, or that a man cannot become a woman, and a woman cannot become a man.
They’ll just treat it the same as the hippies treated Eastern Religions: Create bastardized versions that make a mockery of the original.
I doubt many Buddhist monks or Hindu Gurus would have approved of Free Love…
Will the Maori tradition of eating people be revived? What were their favourite recipes and cooking techniques? And remember, again according to tradition, only other Maori can be eaten.
You get what you vote for.
The problem with that statement is that , that is all there is to vote for.
Yes, it seems that 99.9999% of people who go into politics do so because they suck at life in general. They want everyone else to be miserable too.
When will ‘journalists’ start asking the Maori about what they did to the Moriori? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori_genocide
Another shining example of the noble savage. That has actually never existed, except in the minds of those white people who hate white people.
If they are true, then they can be tested using the scientific method.
But that would go against the idea that they have special knowledge
To do a ‘true’ Māori scientific test, you’d have to employ a medicine man or woman.
I propose a test with the New Zealand government and university academics getting only traditional Māori medical treatment. They would also have to give up things like eye glasses. And of course no chlorinated water.
The interesting thing about teaching Christianity as science is that Christianity and Judaism have a 3,000 year written history. Maori have a written history dating from when the first white man started writing about them. Woke witchcraft is now taught in school instead of religion and Maori science from people who never invented the wheel.
…but…but…but…the Big Bang!
…but…but…but Darwinian Evolution!
Self-awareness not yer strong suit, is it?
Why would old richard care what anybody does when we’ll all be the same worm food in the end? According to him, there’s no God, and the only response the universe has when we die is the thunk as the coffin hits the bottom.
Or is it that his god is humanity and science, and don’t take the name of HIS god in vain?
(polite applause)
We ARE indeed “the same worm food in the end”.
Christianity has many good messages when it comes to morals and behavior. But it sure does not say anything significant about science.
Men growing up in the West used to be, until very recently, inundated with Christian culture, which is a good thing, whether or not they eventually believed in the Christian God or not.
Christianity has made several positive contributions to human knowledge, including science.
Not that it needs science to explain itself but whatever.
Follow the science … unless you’re a noble indigenous moon barker?
People who think that religion trumps science, or the reverse, that science trumps religion are both making a logical type error, its like saying that watchmaking trumps prose.
I believe that neither Richard Dawkins nor Maori “knowledge keepers” are solid sources of information.
I think they are both solid sources of information.
If I want to know plant biology and genetics, or whatever, Dawkins is the go-to guy.
If I want to survive in the wilderness of New Zealand using only stone-age technology, I’ll go with the Maori knowledge.
If you think that any single source of knowledge is the be-all and end-all, well, you are most emphatically wrong.
Let me rephrase: Dawkins the hither-come-lately mouthpiece of militant atheism and the romanticism of Stone Age cultures that only liberal academia use as cudgels are not solid sources of information.
Richard Dawkins spent the majority of his life trying to tear down some of the major pillars of western society, mainly Christianity.
I find it somewhat perplexing that now that his wish has been granted he is upset with the result which was quite predictable to anyone with open eyes.
He always has been a pompous blowhard, and now he has become a very forgetful one.
What you said.
An honest atheist would at least acknowledge the importance of the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western Civilisation.
That seems beyond Dawkins.
“An honest atheist would at least acknowledge the importance of the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western Civilisation.
That seems beyond Dawkins.”
Dawkins has said that Christianity is a bulwark against barbarism.
Dawkins has said that Children should all read the King James Bible.
But I guess that anything short of full conversion will never be enough.
“Dawkins has said that Christianity is a bulwark against barbarism.
Dawkins has said that Children should all read the King James Bible.”
He might say that now, but he never said it 20-40 years ago when it might have done some good. Just the opposite was his rhetoric then.
Would these be the same texts that he himself does not read, nor brought up as examples of the West’s greatness?
“the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father.”
To which we have to rely totally on the “word” of who?
Because they weren’t smart enough to create writing any proof that doctrine’s not totally lifted from a 1960’s Disney movie doesn’t exist.
They weren’t smart enough…and how is our society any better? We’re getting the ‘science’ of global warming/climate change, vaccines and covid bs shoved down our throats and everyone just sits back at takes it, how smart is that? Have a look at our society before you tar and feather someone else.
Everyone’s NOT just sitting back and taking it.
I won’t stop pointing anything not smart enough out.
Then point out that a culture whose members are not capable of distinguishing mythos from logos, and the relative value of each, but, rather tries to assert the dominance of one over the other, is not smart enough to survive.
Its not nice to make light of sudden infant death syndrome and if one contraption can save any infants life then the whole darn world is better off for it.
Its clear that Dawkins is also under fire for asserting that Christian myths also are not science.
Stick a fork in the west. Its done.
“the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father.”
Ancient Song of our Forefathers dept:
After the Hurricane – Paul Evans (1961)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ydVy_JRGs8
Biblical literalism (like the idea that a man really did live in the belly of a whale, that humans were made at the same time as animals, etc) is an attempt to force mythos into the domain of logos.
Communism, fascism, even capitalism are attempts to force logos into the domain of mythos.
Hylas gets seduced and drowned by the Naiads.
Biblical literalists: Blasphemy!
Atheists: There’s no such thing as Naiads!
Normal people: Heh, just goes to show, don’t follow yer dick to the exclusion of all else.
Garbage spouted by losers who didn’t take math in school and have no idea what science is. The ones responsible for the COVID lockdowns and leading us to perdition with their Green agenda
The natives of the new world hadn’t evolved at the same speed as most of those in the old. A lot of the modern world had dropped the idea of multiple gods and concentrated their efforts on a monolithic deity. Initially the idea sold pretty well among the tribes everywhere. They lived in the spirit world. The Ojibwe believe they reincarnate as bears, The Apache become coyotes. You couldn’t induce either of them to kill a bear or coyote because they might be killing their grandpa or dead brother.
Prior to the arrival of the Spanish and ‘colonization’ the life of the NA Indian was “short brutish and nasty”. They lived in a constant state of warfare. An infected tooth would kill you. They had a life expectancy in the teens.
They did have, as you might expect, an outstanding insight to the natural world. They lived in it and had to survive minute to minute. They were able to deal with the most severe weather, find food and survived in the harshest environment – the high Arctic. They lived one step ahead of their enemies and the animals they pursued.
Their ‘science’ as you might expect evolved from living with nature. Unable to explain the rotation of the earth or why an eclipse occurs they had plants and treatments for ailments although a cut finger might result in infection and death. They had no double blind tests or peer review. It is hard to equate native ‘science’ or traditional knowledge (which cannot be explained) with the modern scientific method.