Wow. You check the board in the morning–no action, go to work, come home, and find you’ve been left in the proverbial dust.
Originally posted by Bandit LOAF:
I am against extrapolating a completely unintended meaning based on technical arguments rather than anyones intentions.
I think I remember this correctly; it’s been a long while since I read it. There’s an amusing account that Isaac Asimov gives in one of his books about the time he anonymously attended a lecture where a professor interpreted one of his stories in a way that Asimov never intended. After the lecture, he proudly introduced himself and set about “correcting” the professor only to be rebuffed that his being the “distinguished” author gave him no right whatsoever to dictate how others should interpret his writing. Reflecting on that, Asimov finally decided that the professor was right, as deflating as that was.
I’m with Asimov. I’m still not sure if we have a general disagreement here though. I guess your term “technical arguments” gives me pause. But maybe it’s not important in the present case.
It's clear that the Church of Man is intended as more than something else to blow up... but it's also clear that the intent is to be a commentary on the supposed hypocracy of religion.
And in going over my posts and thinking about what it was that attracted me to the ongoing discussion, I believe that I accepted that intended meaning. It’s just that I was out to skewer it. I disagree with the commentary, as some of my prior remarks to DetailedTarget perhaps makes clearer.
To then take this and decode something else *simply* for the sake of trying to sound impressive seems like a waste.
I really don’t think anyone was doing that. I certainly wasn’t. In fact, with a few off-the-cuff exceptions, I’ve never posted on this board unless I was sincerely interested in the topic and honestly thought I could contribute to it. (And I offer my embarrassingly low post count as at least some proof, either of my humility or slow mind. Your choice.
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The difference with the case of Blair is that it's something we truly *don't* understand -- and so it becomes almost necessary to try and sort it out in our minds.
But a difference without much of a distinction, I think. When one truly disagrees with something, that too usually begs to be sorted out.
Originally posted by DetailedTarget:
I don't understand why you would think that faith is "an inescapable state of mind". . . . For the most part, we can try the experiment(s) ourselves and see that they are true. . . . For things where we can't recreate the experiments . . . we are left to use logic and question what is presented to us.
You’re telling me that you yourself have proven that the Earth revolves around the sun? (I thought about going with general relativity, but I wanted to give you a chance.) If so, I salute you. If not, your belief that it does rests on faith. (And if you deny you have that belief at all, I’m going to accuse you of mocking Sherlock Holmes.
) In any event, none of us has the time to personally confirm every “truth” on which we rely in our lives. Faith is therefore unavoidable no matter how skeptical and “open-minded” we like to think we are.
Remember, logic is your friend.
But not always the friend of truth. It was mostly “logic” that sustained Aristotle’s conception/misconception of physical reality for around two thousand years.
As for religion, well, good bad or indifferent, religion is and always has been used as a mean to control people.
It’s easy to criticize the ways in which the most fundamental questions we can ask about birth and death and everything in between have been “institutionalized”. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that religion and mythology comprise a valuable body of knowledge in the form of metaphor, a curious hybrid of truth and faith. And that “baby” can’t take being split in two either.
Originally posted by Nep Parth:
Saying that scientific law is another religion doesn't fly...
No one said that. What I essentially said was that when it comes to the person-in-the-street, science is mostly a matter of faith. But I will say that science too, as an intellectual discipline, comprises a fair amount of faith. Just take a good hard look at theoretical physics today.