Church and State: The "Sacramental Engineering" Case

crimsonorca42 said:I think you hit the nail on the head here. 👍

It’s probably why the humanities keeps peddling all sorts of nonsense to us—right from the top levels of the Department of Education. 😬

Do people actually think mistakes in mechanical engineering are what's dangerous?

Guiding nonsense in humanities studies (NOT the sciences—those aren't even sciences, I guess) is incomparably more dangerous and harmful.

bluemason3 said:Modern science owes a massive debt to the Greeks. By extension, you could argue science itself was built to support slavery. 🧐

#logic

Look, let's be real—we aren't tossing out creationists themselves, just creationism. If a creationist makes a contribution that actually holds up scientifically, fine. But don't expect that breakthrough to land in evolutionary biology.
Even Newton spent more time obsessing over religion and alchemy than he did on actual physics, so most of that stuff is just noise at this point.

Philosophers, perhaps.
Science? I don't know... take away Archimedes and what's even left?

Timothy Nelson5 said:Philosophers, perhaps.
Science? I don't know... take away Archimedes and what's even left?

Take away Newton and Einstein and what do you have left?

The geometry curriculum, for instance, relied heavily on ancient Greek foundations until quite recently; they were incredibly advanced back then. While our methodology has shifted today, much of the core content remains "ancient" through even relatively advanced levels.

bluemason3 said:Take away Newton and Einstein and what do you have left?

The geometry curriculum, for instance, relied heavily on ancient Greek foundations until quite recently; they were incredibly advanced back then. While our methodology has shifted today, much of the core content remains "ancient" through even relatively advanced levels.

Nicholas of Cusa, Copernicus, Kepler, ... Volta, Pascal, Kelvin, Babbage...
... Boyle, Lavoisier, Euler, Faraday, Maxwell, Mendel...

A good number of them were priests—true believers, really... and I haven't even started counting the Jews...

The geometry curriculum, for instance, was based on ancient Greek foundations until quite recently; they were incredibly advanced back then. Methodologically, things have shifted today, but the core content remains largely "ancient" even through fairly advanced levels.

Ancient, sure, but not necessarily Greek.
The Kufu pyramid is basically a monument built around Pi, Phi, and those other "numbers"... and the Cheops pyramid serves as a testament to triangular geometry, all two and a half millennia before Pythagoras...

You say Greek...

Look, you little sophist, why even bother spinning this 😁

Even in America, Islamic scholarship had an impact (though, again, they were building on Greek foundations), and Indians brought their own flavors to the table too... everyone borrows something from someone else. But the core of Western geometry? It’s rooted in Greece. We were essentially using Greek textbooks right up until the modern era.

Timothy Nelson5 said:If they’re just nonsense—then why are people actually studying them?
Why on earth are we footing the bill for degrees that teach nothing but fluff?

And by the way—there’s this constant push for everyone to get paid the exact same amount for the same job.
As if we're all somehow "equally valuable."
The idea that a person with an engineering degree from MIT should earn the same paycheck as someone with a gender studies degree.

So, I guess it doesn't really matter if the machinery actually works when it's being designed by people who don't know what they're doing, right?
It's all about feelings and good intentions now, I suppose.

🍿

It isn't nonsense if you know how to cash in on it. Take modern advertising, for instance; those campaigns are engineered using social sciences specifically designed to answer one question: *how do we sell this product as effectively as possible?*

In a massive shopping mall, absolutely nothing is left to chance. From the specific tempo of the background music to the lighting levels and the way the aisles are laid out... everything is meticulously calibrated to ensure the customer walks away with more than they intended.

And all of it is built upon the foundation of the social sciences.

Chloe Martinez7 said:A truly super
idea, I suppose. It’s almost as if the church decides to get involved whenever they need some help from those folks over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology regarding sacramental engineering or sacred architecture and such.

They’ll just hire whoever actually knows how to pull it off; I mean, I’ve personally seen contractors over in Ohio handling construction work for a Catholic church before...

Has anyone actually gone through the trouble of getting their PhD in "Prayer-Powered Engines" yet?

I honestly feel like there’s some serious untapped potential there...

Timothy Nelson5 said:Back when I was a student, during the old socialist era, we had this one course in our first year—I can't quite recall the exact name... but the core was basically Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory... at the time, those terms felt a bit strange to me, certainly different from the usual slogans like Marshall or the Democratic Party... but looking back, I suppose it was just a subtle way of ideologically conditioning the newer generations.
So, I don't really see why anyone is acting surprised now... every era pushes its own ideology, and I guess the pendulum just swings back sometimes...

Besides, didn't Elizabeth Warren get her doctorate with a paper called "The mythical aspect of ecofeminism"? If you actually bother to read it, you'll see just how much nonsense is packed in there... something along the lines of "women are connected to Mother Nature and the cosmos through menstruation"... if I recall correctly.
If that qualifies as a doctoral thesis, then I don't see why a paper analyzing the statistics of material mentions in the Bible is suddenly considered unacceptable...

On that subject:

An interesting comment:
This was funny 7 years ago....
7 years later.... It's literally becoming reality

Just another instance where reality ends up overtaking what used to be mere satire...

Look, she was doctoring science of literature. If this were a grad thesis in the same field or maybe theology, nobody would blink—honestly, the topic is even kind of cool.

'women are connected to Mother Nature and the Universe through menstruation'... just paraphrasing here...

Total tangent, but just so we're clear: Holy brings up stuff like that because it's literally what she studied. (Personally, I find studying those patterns in ancient religions fascinating—like how Neolithic Great Mother worship echoes through historical faiths like Islam...) She wasn't actually preaching them. Her political vibe when she ran the Green Party was pretty standard "social ecology" stuff (not gonna go down the rabbit hole of all the different ecological theories right now).

Timothy Nelson5 said:I actually read that dissertation. Well, I didn't exactly study it, but I skimmed through it pretty quickly. And, honestly, I noticed some of the most... interesting choices she made.
It was available online back then, so you can go ahead and dig through it yourself if you feel the need.

And maybe you, or anyone else, could explain something to me—what does it mean that the humanities can just push through any kind of nonsense, while something like MIT can't?
Why isn't that the case?

Well, when you're writing about literature, you're dealing with what people have put on paper throughout history. And let's face it, a huge chunk of that is nonsense.
You're looking at products of the human imagination. You can write about Native American creation myths, Hindu legends, thunder gods in various religions, zombies, centaurs, X-Men, whatever... But in literary studies, religious studies, etc... 😁
I've been digging through sci-fi since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I could probably whip up a paper on "Pandemic Apocalypses in 20th Century Literature." Someone out there might actually find it interesting or publish it. (The first one I stumbled upon was Jack London's "Scarlet Plague" from 1912.) But I wouldn't call that medical science by any stretch.
😛

Timothy Nelson5 said:Back when I was a student, during the old socialist era, we had this one course in our first year—I can't quite recall the exact name... but the core was basically Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory... at the time, those terms felt a bit strange to me, certainly different from the usual slogans like Marshall or the Democratic Party... but looking back, I suppose it was just a subtle way of ideologically conditioning the newer generations.
So, I don't really see why anyone is acting surprised now... every era pushes its own ideology, and I guess the pendulum just swings back sometimes...

Besides, didn't Elizabeth Warren get her doctorate with a paper called "The mythical aspect of ecofeminism"? If you actually bother to read it, you'll see just how much nonsense is packed in there... something along the lines of "women are connected to Mother Nature and the cosmos through menstruation"... if I recall correctly.
If that qualifies as a doctoral thesis, then I don't see why a paper analyzing the statistics of material mentions in the Bible is suddenly considered unacceptable...

On that subject:

An interesting comment:
This was funny 7 years ago....
7 years later.... It's literally becoming reality

Just another instance where reality ends up overtaking what used to be mere satire...

You were listening to Marxism because it was a mandatory requirement (even if they called it something else), but you were studying Marxism within an engineering program, not "Engineering Marxism" or "Marxist Mechanical Engineering."

The reality is that under the socialist system, subjects like Marxism or sociology were integrated into almost every major. It's also true that, for the most part, they served as tools for indoctrination. However, people weren't sitting in "Sociology of Mechanical Engineering" or "Marxism for Electrical Engineering"; rather, the idea was that students of engineering, electrical tech, or agriculture needed to grasp the broader social landscape they lived in. Of course, that brings us right back to the question of how much of that was genuine social insight versus pure indoctrination.

But regardless, when we are talking about the hard sciences, these were two entirely separate spheres: you studied your engineering because you had to, and you sat through some Marxism or sociology just to check a box—likely doing the bare minimum to pass—but it existed as a distinct entity. You wouldn't go looking for electrical schematics inside Marx's *Capital* or Engels' *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State*.

What we are seeing now, with this supposed 'introduction of the Bible into engineering,' is a completely different beast. The Bible, as a collection of texts with diverse origins and eras, can certainly be analyzed through the lens of the humanities—looking at historical context, literary merit, dramatic structure, or its inherent messaging. But it simply cannot serve as the foundation for exact, empirical research. A collection of texts that claims to be dogma and eternal truth cannot be the basis for the hard sciences and rigorous scientific inquiry—which is precisely what an original, technical engineering paper ought to be.

I mean, what follows this: Catholic Dentistry?

Charles Ross3 said:You were listening to Marxism because it was a mandatory requirement (even if they called it something else), but you were studying Marxism within an engineering program, not "Engineering Marxism" or "Marxist Mechanical Engineering."

The reality is that under the socialist system, subjects like Marxism or sociology were integrated into almost every major. It's also true that, for the most part, they served as tools for indoctrination. However, people weren't sitting in "Sociology of Mechanical Engineering" or "Marxism for Electrical Engineering"; rather, the idea was that students of engineering, electrical tech, or agriculture needed to grasp the broader social landscape they lived in. Of course, that brings us right back to the question of how much of that was genuine social insight versus pure indoctrination.

But regardless, when we are talking about the hard sciences, these were two entirely separate spheres: you studied your engineering because you had to, and you sat through some Marxism or sociology just to check a box—likely doing the bare minimum to pass—but it existed as a distinct entity. You wouldn't go looking for electrical schematics inside Marx's *Capital* or Engels' *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State*.

What we are seeing now, with this supposed 'introduction of the Bible into engineering,' is a completely different beast. The Bible, as a collection of texts with diverse origins and eras, can certainly be analyzed through the lens of the humanities—looking at historical context, literary merit, dramatic structure, or its inherent messaging. But it simply cannot serve as the foundation for exact, empirical research. A collection of texts that claims to be dogma and eternal truth cannot be the basis for the hard sciences and rigorous scientific inquiry—which is precisely what an original, technical engineering paper ought to be.

I mean, what follows this: Catholic Dentistry?

If we were talking about building stuff from the Bible, sure, I might follow along... but when you bring mechanical engineering into the mix, well, that's a whole different story altogether... 😲

Apropos Marxism, you can't deny that indoctrination is always part of the equation...
It’s just like how the UN and the Department of State act during that first year at any major university... 🤦

I have to admit, there’s a certain logic to how our later setup—with mandatory military service, those reserves, and the Territorial Defense units...—actually gave us a fighting chance when it came to securing our independence...
I can only begin to imagine what the final outcome would have been if, back in the days of Yu about twenty or thirty years ago, we had been dealing with a purely professional military force...

Charles Ross3 said:You were listening to Marxism because it was a mandatory requirement (even if they called it something else), but you were studying Marxism within an engineering program, not "Engineering Marxism" or "Marxist Mechanical Engineering."

The reality is that under the socialist system, subjects like Marxism or sociology were integrated into almost every major. It's also true that, for the most part, they served as tools for indoctrination. However, people weren't sitting in "Sociology of Mechanical Engineering" or "Marxism for Electrical Engineering"; rather, the idea was that students of engineering, electrical tech, or agriculture needed to grasp the broader social landscape they lived in. Of course, that brings us right back to the question of how much of that was genuine social insight versus pure indoctrination.

But regardless, when we are talking about the hard sciences, these were two entirely separate spheres: you studied your engineering because you had to, and you sat through some Marxism or sociology just to check a box—likely doing the bare minimum to pass—but it existed as a distinct entity. You wouldn't go looking for electrical schematics inside Marx's *Capital* or Engels' *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State*.

What we are seeing now, with this supposed 'introduction of the Bible into engineering,' is a completely different beast. The Bible, as a collection of texts with diverse origins and eras, can certainly be analyzed through the lens of the humanities—looking at historical context, literary merit, dramatic structure, or its inherent messaging. But it simply cannot serve as the foundation for exact, empirical research. A collection of texts that claims to be dogma and eternal truth cannot be the basis for the hard sciences and rigorous scientific inquiry—which is precisely what an original, technical engineering paper ought to be.

I mean, what follows this: Catholic Dentistry?

Perhaps we could achieve a breakthrough with topics like "Influence of blessing on fatigue material" or "Holy guide and corrosion." 🤔

silentnomad7 said:Has anyone actually gone through the trouble of getting their PhD in "Prayer-Powered Engines" yet?

I honestly feel like there’s some serious untapped potential there...

I mean, come on—haven't we all shouted "Please, God, just make this thing start!" at least once while turning a key?

Charles Ross3 said:You were listening to Marxism because it was a mandatory requirement (even if they called it something else), but you were studying Marxism within an engineering program, not "Engineering Marxism" or "Marxist Mechanical Engineering."

The reality is that under the socialist system, subjects like Marxism or sociology were integrated into almost every major. It's also true that, for the most part, they served as tools for indoctrination. However, people weren't sitting in "Sociology of Mechanical Engineering" or "Marxism for Electrical Engineering"; rather, the idea was that students of engineering, electrical tech, or agriculture needed to grasp the broader social landscape they lived in. Of course, that brings us right back to the question of how much of that was genuine social insight versus pure indoctrination.

But regardless, when we are talking about the hard sciences, these were two entirely separate spheres: you studied your engineering because you had to, and you sat through some Marxism or sociology just to check a box—likely doing the bare minimum to pass—but it existed as a distinct entity. You wouldn't go looking for electrical schematics inside Marx's *Capital* or Engels' *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State*.

What we are seeing now, with this supposed 'introduction of the Bible into engineering,' is a completely different beast. The Bible, as a collection of texts with diverse origins and eras, can certainly be analyzed through the lens of the humanities—looking at historical context, literary merit, dramatic structure, or its inherent messaging. But it simply cannot serve as the foundation for exact, empirical research. A collection of texts that claims to be dogma and eternal truth cannot be the basis for the hard sciences and rigorous scientific inquiry—which is precisely what an original, technical engineering paper ought to be.

I mean, what follows this: Catholic Dentistry?

We are talking about a single thesis here, wrapped up in some witty attempt at "honesty" by someone like Vučetić, and you've already decided to rename the entire field of Mechanical Engineering based on his whims?! 🤔

And since when did a theologian like Vučetić become an expert in mechanical engineering?

Regarding higher education in general, theology was actually one of the foundational disciplines at Universities when they first emerged, alongside philosophy and law. There wasn't really anything else.

Maybe we should just strike the early history of higher education in Europe from the record altogether, since they mostly just studied dogmas and legal loopholes anyway. It didn't have much to do with actual science. 🤔 😉

crimsonorca42 said:We are talking about a single thesis here, wrapped up in some witty attempt at "honesty" by someone like Vučetić, and you've already decided to rename the entire field of Mechanical Engineering based on his whims?! 🤔

And since when did a theologian like Vučetić become an expert in mechanical engineering?

Regarding higher education in general, theology was actually one of the foundational disciplines at Universities when they first emerged, alongside philosophy and law. There wasn't really anything else.

Maybe we should just strike the early history of higher education in Europe from the record altogether, since they mostly just studied dogmas and legal loopholes anyway. It didn't have much to do with actual science. 🤔 😉

But hold on, nobody actually renamed the Mechanical Engineering program—neither me nor him. He was simply referring to that specific episode over at the technical school.

And look, people still study theology today, just not within a Mechanical Engineering or Electrical Engineering curriculum.

It’s true that the very first academic studies revolved around religion and faith, but surely something evolved in the intervening years? Just as different scientific branches began to differentiate, specialized fields emerged, pulling away from religious dogma and moving toward the exact sciences.

The point is, we are discussing an exact, technical faculty in the 21st century, not a seminar on religious doctrine.

Since when is a theologian like Vučetić an expert in mechanical engineering?

In his comment, he doesn't actually say a single word about mechanical engineering; he's merely commenting on topics that fall squarely within his usual area of expertise.

By that logic, since when is a professor of mechanical engineering an expert in theology?
And since when did the Bible become a textbook for engineering? Since when did the Ark of the Covenant, sheep's horn trumpets, biblical measurement systems, or the logistics of transporting cedar logs from Lebanon to Jerusalem become valid topics for a thesis at a technical university?

I can't upload an image here, so I'll just link the site—the header image is actually used in that thesis I mentioned earlier. (Figure 1: Bible and Science).

https://ziva-rijec.online/2019/07/05/znanost-i-biblija/

The sheer beauty of Boras's University 👍

Timothy Nelson5 said:Nicholas of Cusa, Copernicus, Kepler, ... Volta, Pascal, Kelvin, Babbage...
... Boyle, Lavoisier, Euler, Faraday, Maxwell, Mendel...

A good number of them were priests—true believers, really... and I haven't even started counting the Jews...

The geometry curriculum, for instance, was based on ancient Greek foundations until quite recently; they were incredibly advanced back then. Methodologically, things have shifted today, but the core content remains largely "ancient" even through fairly advanced levels.

Ancient, sure, but not necessarily Greek.
The Kufu pyramid is basically a monument built around Pi, Phi, and those other "numbers"... and the Cheops pyramid serves as a testament to triangular geometry, all two and a half millennia before Pythagoras...

You say Greek...

Funny how there weren't any outspokenly atheist scientists back during the days of the Holy Inquisition and when churches ran everything. ☕
Nowadays, you see fewer and fewer followers of the Blessed Virgin among the top-tier scientists...

frozenraven22 said:I can't upload an image here, so I'll just link the site—the header image is actually used in that thesis I mentioned earlier. (Figure 1: Bible and Science).

https://ziva-rijec.online/2019/07/05/znanost-i-biblija/

The sheer beauty of Boras's University 👍

Just some religious portal run by a Christian sect led by that guy Canadian called "Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah".🙂

William Cooper11 said:If you ask me, this whole situation was totally predictable, and I’d bet my life it won't be the last one we see. This is the kind of person who hangs on every single word Damir Stojić says. They'll end up marrying some guy just like them—probably someone working for the FBI or an engineer from MIT—who spends his Saturdays kneeling in a public square. Both will have high-end salaries, a big family, and they'll think life is perfect, provided everyone else in Rhode Island starts living exactly according to their moral compass.

You could probably draw a similar parallel with the students over at the College of Liberal Arts. They follow Goldstein and Josipovic blindly, only to come out the other side demanding equality and tolerance—but strictly for people who already agree with them.

Lawrence Rodriguez11 said:You could probably draw a similar parallel with the students over at the College of Liberal Arts. They follow Goldstein and Josipovic blindly, only to come out the other side demanding equality and tolerance—but strictly for people who already agree with them.

The whole point of a College of Arts and Sciences education is learning not to take anyone’s word at face value, including your own. Every philosophical or scientific authority is subject to scrutiny. When we discuss a specific philosopher, the goal isn't just to praise their insights, but to examine where they fell short. Scientific theories aren't sacred texts; they are tools provided to researchers specifically so they can be tested—and ultimately dismantled.

I have to say, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you seem to have a fundamentally flawed understanding of what philosophy actually is. It isn't a tragedy, though; it's all something that can be learned, especially nowadays with the internet at our fingertips.