Summary
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Response
At first, I thought this would be a story about someone who was building a rocket at home as hobby. They would be weird, but fun. It's certainly not a passion that I share, although one of my nephews does share a similar passion. He is a bit of a geek, and in high school, built rockets as challenges. Andy's also flew as planned, but they were a more modest size, and I don't think he ever planned to actually build one that he might sit in himself. I never shared Andy's passion, although remember following with great interest our species' successful landing on the moon when I was in primary school. I was also a bit geeky in high school, but my passions tended more towards theoretical physics than rocket science. I think it's good that we have things we are passionate about, even if I don't share most people's passions. One of my friends loves the Star Wars films and everything connected to them, but I can't stand them, and other friends play musical instruments, or are wine buffs and so on. I enjoy those things, but they are not really my passions. On the other hand, my passionate interest in philosophy and ancient history probably seems a bit weird to others, including my friends and family. I think that's OK. It would be boring if we all had the same interests. |
| Aristotle was wrong about a lot, but he knew the Earth was a sphere |
But the BBC article is not about a man simply building a rocket for fun, as I discovered when I read it. Mike Hughes actually believed that the world is flat. I really can't understand how anyone could believe that in 2020. In fact, Aristotle knew that the world was a sphere more than 2,000 years ago, and gave good arguments based on the evidence in his book on astronomy. And about 400 years ago, Copernicus, Galileo and other scientists greatly upset the Christian pope by arguing that the Earth was not a sphere at the centre of the universe, about which everything revolved, but was really just one among several planets, all spheres, that circled the sun. I don't think any educated Western person has believed that the Earth was flat for about 2,500 years. Homer's hero Achilles might have thought it flat, but even that is doubtful. Yet there are groups on the Internet who say that is what they believe. They have conference to present their arguments and evidence, and most of us laugh at them. But Hughes appears to have been so serious that he invested money and work into proving his theory. And in the end he paid with his life.
It reminds me of the much larger groups of people who refuse to believe widely accepted things, for example the conspiracy theorists who think that the US did not really land on the moon in 1969, or that the CIA actually blew up the World Trade Tower buildings in 2001. And in Thailand we recently had the bizarre case of people a court accepting a claim that the Future Forward Political party was run by a mysterious group of people called the Illuminati! These ideas are seem to me profoundly stupid, but clearly there are people who seriously believe them. More worrying are the large numbers who reject one of the main theories of modern science, the theory of evolution, which successfully explains how all life on Earth is related and evolving. But I don't think beliefs shouuld be banned just because they are unpopular, or minority opinion, or known to be false: it is healthy to let people keep trying to disprove accepted theories, even that the Earth is a sphere. After all, Aristotle was wrong about our position in space, although for more than a thousand years, society, and the churches especially believed we were the centre of everything, and they made it a crime to say otherwise because it was against their religious ideology. Perhaps we should be more humble about even our most certain beliefs. And if people want to risk their lives for their beliefs, as Girodano Bruno did for science when the evil Christian leaders killed him because of his scientific discoveries supporting Copernicus's theory that we are not the centre of everything in the universe, they must be allowed to do that, as Mike Hughes did. In fact, if people want to engage in dangerous behaviour for fun, I think that just law must let them do that as well, whether sky diving or doing drugs.
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Question
Should the law criminalize dangerous acts based on false beliefs such as those of "Mad" Mike?
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Reference
- 'Mad' Mike Hughes dies after crash-landing homemade rocket. (2020, February 23). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51602655
Note about reference citations: The APA style reference citation above is a little different to the previous ones. This is because in October last year, the APA Publication Manual's seventh edition was published, and as usual, it revised the way some reference citations are written. For the moment, both the previous 6th edition style from 2012 and the revised 2019 style are acceptable, with the former still in common use. (I only started changing recently.)
My chosen source is relatively short, and there were not a lot of ideas I thought important enough to include, so my summary here is only 104 words. That's not a problem. It is below the maximum word limit of 140, and achieves the task of summarzing main ideas in my chosen source in my own words. But I still had to read that source a few times, decide what ideas to include in my summary, and then organize them into a coherent paragrpah for readers.
ReplyDeleteMike Hughes is crazy person and I felt sad for his lost. Mike had a strong belief, assertive ambition and high self-confidence all these combination leads him to block all opinions from majority's views.
ReplyDeleteBuddhism teach us to do not belief in what other people said and you have to prof it yourself but you may need to study hard to find the truth. Buddhism also teach us not to take an extreme path when we do things in every aspect of life. We need to find the middle way to live and understand that not thing is perfect and permanent, such as Buddha's diet and self-torture practices those are too extreme methods to search for happiness. How you would find a peaceful life if your are still starving to death. This is a key concept which we can adapt in anything.
Thank you Naam. I'm guessing that the Buddhist teaching you had in mind is the Kalama Sutta (กาลามสูตร), which is one of my favourites. It seems to me to teach important elements of critical thinking, and also explain one reason why free speech is so essential to a healthy society: if old ideas or socially accepted traditions cannot be critically questioned, then mistakes and bad ideas cannot be corrected. I've also liked that the Buddha sensibly revised his own opinions when new evidence or reasons were discovered. I think he might disagree with a lot of ideas that some Buddhists today still accept.
DeleteAnd I enjoyed reading how you related those ideas from your cultural background to the issues in my chosen source and my own response to it.