A research and expository notebook by Orest Kinasevych
“Polyculturalism directs attention to how people pick up proficiencies from multiple cultures throughout their life span through a range of different learning processes, some explicit and some implicit.” (p 639)
“The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to [page break] science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. A modern believer can say and even believe that his faith is quite compatible with science and medicine, but the awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion’s monopoly, and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason.” (p 46-47)
“The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. Perhaps we can hear a little less about how ‘people of faith’ possess moral advantages that others can only envy.” (p 32)
“God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.” (p 8)
“Indigenous languages also represent complex systems of knowledge developed and accumulated over thousands of years. Local languages are indeed a kind of cultural treasure; they are repositories of diversity and key resources for both understanding the environment and utilizing it to the best advantage of local populations, as well as of humanity as a whole. They foster and promote local cultural specificities, customs and values which have endured for thousands of years.” (p 2-3)
“‘Many of our children no longer speak Navajo, the reason being because we have so many influences now in this world,’ said Bilagody.” (¶17)
“The number of Aboriginal people able to speak an Aboriginal language exceeded the number who reported an Aboriginal mother tongue. This suggests that many people, especially young people, are learning Aboriginal languages as second languages.” (p 1)
“One study group has argued that we have an obligation to future generations to think fifty years ahead, and criticizes most commercial and political planning for its ‘horizon blindness’ beyond about ten years.” (p 67)
“… there are many who have denied that time really _does_ pass. Of these a few share McTaggart’s view that time cannot pass because time does not exist. A more popular view, these days at least, is the view that while time certainly exists, it is more akin to space than it superficially seems. … Time _per se_ may not pass or flow, but there is undeniably something akin to passage and flow in our immediate experience, and this _phenomenal_ passage does not require _physical_ passage, it can exist a four-dimensional Block universe.” (¶270)
“… as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.” (¶4)