Re:As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity ha...
by RichardCA on Sunday June 13, 2021 @04:09PM
(#27495917)
When Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod, he had to be persuasive enough to get people to believe that electricity wasn't just a parlor trick you do with a glass rod and a silk scarf. It's also how clouds create lightning, and the fundamental forces are the same.
You have to remember in the 18th century, lightning killed a lot of people. The fact that lightning rods did, in fact, do what Franklin said they would do was persuasive evidence.
I'm not an expert on the history of Ben Franklin, so I don't know if he ever had to explain that lightning doesn't exist to provide divine retribution. But he did have to get each local church to allow a lightning rod on the steeple with a proper connection to grounding, so I'm sure there were some interesting conversations.
That's not my idea, take it to people who are treating science as such. You know, "believe the science" crowd, that will just take at face value whatever media happens to say at the time.
Electricity and the internet are out of scope for religion. Religion is closer to humanist subjects, sociology, psychology, ethics etc.