Making Sense of Diversity
A friend wrote this:
“My very intelligent, engineer brother got into fundamentalist Christianity in college and never got out of it. He later married his at-least-as-fundamentalist wife who birthed half a dozen kids whom they homeschooled so the kids would never have to have their minds polluted by the real world. (I don't often get this blunt about it.) They taught their kids Creationism and all of that. They did finally send them all to schools in middle or high school - but NOT to public schools. Mostly to exclusive fundamentalist Christian schools. It seemed like science that might hint at (or proclaim loudly about) the truth of evolution, impinged on these parents' minds not in the least. I always thought that, had my brother been a biology major instead of an engineer, he would have had an entirely different life - but I guess that's true of all of us - if we had taken a different path, we would've lived different lives. But as an engineer, he could spend his whole life surrounded by very precise, intelligent people who didn't necessarily have to make sense of the natural world at all.”
My response:
“I don't think you've gone too far with wanting and trying to understand differences. Mathematics spoils us into thinking life can be boiled down to (sometimes simple, often difficult) equations."
