TED Community » Bengt Lennartsson

More About Me

I'm passionate about

The sequence: Motivation - learning - understanding - acting.
Intuitions, reasoning, conscious and subconscious decisions.

An idea worth spreading

I grew up in a Christian culture, taught that the Christian beliefs are the only true ones. That the Christian bible was the norm to follow. Today I have severe difficulty to understand how the Christian believers are able to combine the narrow intolerant views and values presented in the Old Testament, written thousands of years ago, with the incredibly wise and open-minded views in the New Testament, written around A.D. 200-300.
The history of universe, earth, and man, as told in the Old Testament, has been almost totally falsified by science the last centuries. The god, as presented in the Old Testament, had horrible values. Women and people from other places and with other beliefs had no value at all. Killing and raping such beings was recommended.
The authors of the New Testament, on the other hand, despite telling stories easily falsifiable, had an insight and presented values more than 1000 years ahead of their time. It is a miracle they had insight to do so in those days!

Talk to me about

Countries I have not visited and cultures and beliefs I know little about.

People don't know that I'm good at

Baking bread, in particular sourdough type.
Genealogy: I am running internet based courses on "Information Retrieval over the Internet - applied to genealogy"

My TED Story

Hans Rosling was a speaker at our International Conference on Thinking 2007 here in Norrkoping. We had a heavy thunderstorm resulting in power failure, and the computers, projectors etc. died. However, there was still emergency light in the lecture hall.
Rosling's presentations at that time, highly appreciated on TED, were totally based on his Gap Minder with the bubbles in his diagrams moving back and forth. Hence I, and the audience, expected Hans to lose control of the situation.
Not at all. He just told us when during surgeries in Mozambique, electricity frequently disappeared, so he was used to such things. He continued his talk without difficulty. When computers were back again he just connected to his bubbles again. Marvellous! There is just one person like that, Hans Rosling.
After our successful TEDxNorrkoping events Sept 2011 and June 2012, we have held TEDxNorrkopingED, Oct 2012 and TEDxNorrkopingLive Feb 2013.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +3276.40 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +1

  A reply on Conversation: Rupert Sheldrake's TEDx talk: Detailing the issues

  Mar 8 2013: Joe Martin and others,
  My initial comment was based only on my viewing Rupert Sheldrake's TEDxTalk, not on any knowledge or information about his background or about the controverses he has been involved in. Your comment made me look at his track record. Of course, it is impossible to get a complete and fair picture of his abilities just by means of 15 minutes Internet research. However, this quick research convinced me that the presentation in his TEDx Talk about the different measured and published values of the speed of light, was consciously misleading rather than fair. With his background in science, e.g. biochemistry, he must (or should) have known better.
  Neither your comments nor his list of publications makes me change my opinion, that his TEDx Talk shold be removed, not because he accuses science to be bassed on a set of false, or at least questionable, dogmas, but because his bias and his use of misleading or false arguments.
  You may look upon "his refusal to let fear of controversy impede his expression and enjoyment of the pursuit of truth that is science" as entertaining, but viewers expecting "ideas worth spreading" will be misled.
• +13

  A comment on Conversation: Rupert Sheldrake's TEDx talk: Detailing the issues

  Mar 7 2013: We must allow for questioning also the most established truths, but that does not mean that everybody doing so, should be given free space and full attention. There must be some kind of sense and quality in the arguments and not just a claim that some existing theories or models are wrong. Rupert Sheldrake claims there is evidence.without giving any refrences, Natural science is far from the set of beliefs he initially accuses it to be. The success of science comes from the requrement on reproducability and verifiability. He may believe in "collective memory" of species and x-tals, in "mind outside brain" etc., but as long as there is no empirical evidence, it is just his un-informed belief. He is making a big issue of different measured values of the speed of light (variation of less than 0,01% before lasers and atomic clocks) and of G (gravity). It is difficult to believe that he is really doing his very best to understand the reasons for the different measured values. And why spend efforts on this materialistic aspect, when claiming science is just about beliefs?
  I think his talk should be removed. Not because of his points, but because of the total lack of arguments and evidence. If you challenge the established accumulated scientific knowledge, you must have something supporting your challenge.

• A comment on Talk: A robot that flies like a bird

  Jul 30 2011: At last! I have been looking forward to a demo like this