A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

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Philo Sofee
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Re: A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

Post by Philo Sofee »

Kishkumen wrote:
Tue May 17, 2022 12:07 am
Philo Sofee wrote:
Mon May 16, 2022 11:38 pm
I suspect the problem we have hit upon in our age is that we (society - more or less) has concretized the metaphor to what myths are pointing to. We look at the pointing finger because it is physically there right in front of us instead of realizing the vastness it is pointing to (again a metaphor - I realize it is pointing to space which is physical - or is it?), and therefore part of the metaphor is limiting ourselves to just what is in front of our eyes. I'm just thinking out loud is all.
You are right on target here, Philo. You put it much better than I did. In response, I read about how the LDS Church is saying the finger is the thing and so religion is bad. I could repeat myself about the finger and the moon, but I am afraid I would just keep seeing the same responses. People are understandably here to talk about the LDS Church doing things wrong and then concluding that religion is inferior. I think I can agree that a lot of views of religion and manifestations of religion are subpar, but I don’t even know what it means to say the religion is inferior.
I suspect it depends on what one is after in this life... The actual original meaning of the word "religion" has a few layers of meaning that have been lost to the West, for whatever reasons, and thrived in the East, again, for whatever reason. For a while East meets West was useful, but skepticism set in and now the two are not so useful to the other. I hope I am wrong in my perception and able to talk it out as I have time. Don Bradley just asked me to help him go through the documents of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers and I am very happy to do so with him. It may take a bit of time, but if clarity can occur, all the better. I am more than sure he is going to have intelligent questions about it I have not thought of before and that prospect rather excites me...
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Re: A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

Post by dastardly stem »

Kishkumen wrote:
Mon May 16, 2022 8:12 pm


Yeah, I am not sure exactly what you are saying here. I think of treating myth as objectively true as being a huge problem in intellectual history that is probably beyond either of us to unravel and explicate intelligently. The logos is a hugely impactful and multi-faceted thing. I would treat the mythos as very much part of it. When you say myth didn't happen, I shrug my shoulders. In what sense was it meant to happen? Why did you think it should have happened? In what sense did it not happen? Is that the only sense worth taking account of?
I hear this and think, we'll always complicate things. We are just plain want to. But complicating them doesn't justify something like a spiritual realm. If we take the myth of Jesus rising from the dead and apply your questions, what results?

" In what sense was it meant to happen?"

Did Jesus rise up after he died, ascend to heaven and that was witnessed by people? No one is saying it's not a possible act. It's simply a question of whether it happened. It sounds like fanciful myth to me, given more meaning as time passed in religion. If one says "it happened metaphorically". I'm like, ok. What's it a metaphor of? How do we apply that to reality?

"Why did you think it should have happened?"

Its the basis of a dominant world wide religion. If it didn't happen we can give up the religion as hearsay and drop all the unneeded and unhelpful aspects that have plagued us. We're simply better off dropping the spirit realm idea and living rationally.

" In what sense did it not happen?"

Someone 2,000 years ago did not rise from the dead. That's simply myth, repeated thousands of times over by many people's perhaps most inspired by human's fear of death.

"Is that the only sense worth taking account of?"

Of course not. We can grant the event on the basis of possibility to argue for its utility. There is plenty more to do with it. But doing so doesn't answer the question of whether myth really happened and whether we should ever treat myth as a solid basis to define reality. We need to be serious and treat myth the other way around--as a tale with it's messages useful for our pursuit in reality. Not as a truth so we can pretend reality isn't real and what's really real is whatever we really want. Too often our wants are unreasonable and harmful.
So many big questions that we will not really get to the bottom of here. I am satisfied that the thing that seems to be very much in tune with our times is to dismiss myth as irrational and religion along with it to act in line with what is objectively, factually true. I get it. Yeah, that is what a lot of us do. I am not trying to diss anyone for doing what is clearly the thing to do right now. Either you do the seemingly stupid thing of accepting myth as objectively true or you reject that because it does not make sense.

I think there are other options, but I don't think they will ever gain wide currency.
I am proposing there are more options. My question has been why pretend there is a spiritual realm? Not can we find meaning in myth. Sure we can. And ultimately I'm glad we have some room for agreement here, even if our disagreement feels a bit murky.
Last edited by dastardly stem on Tue May 17, 2022 2:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

Post by dastardly stem »

Philo Sofee wrote:
Mon May 16, 2022 11:40 pm
Kishkumen
I am satisfied that the thing that seems to be very much in tune with our times is to dismiss myth as irrational
Yes we have a diachronic approach and vet what we leave unexplored is the supra-rational imagining there are only two options, when in fact, there may very well be three... It's fun to explore.
Its irrational to pretend myths are objectively true events that happened in reality. It's not irrational to use myth in our pursuit of a better world--meaning making this world a better place for us all, not a different realm. Its irrational to pretend another world, or a different reality exists, and say myths carry depths to lead us into that other realm, or something. There's no rational basis to think there is a spiritual realm, it seems to me. And I question the utility of people pretending there is.

I think we're all throwing out lines that seem to be mischaracterizations of each other's points. Meh...that happens a bit when there's disagreement. Hopefully we recognize that and can disagree in an understandable way.
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Re: A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

Post by Kishkumen »

Philo Sofee wrote:
Tue May 17, 2022 3:19 am
I suspect it depends on what one is after in this life...
Very true. We are not necessarily all after the same thing, nor do we have to be.
The actual original meaning of the word "religion" has a few layers of meaning that have been lost to the West, for whatever reasons, and thrived in the East, again, for whatever reason. For a while East meets West was useful, but skepticism set in and now the two are not so useful to the other.
Our understanding of the word religion is only a few centuries old, and is a term that has had an impact on the phenomena it was intended to describe. That causes quite a messy situation.
I hope I am wrong in my perception and able to talk it out as I have time. Don Bradley just asked me to help him go through the documents of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers and I am very happy to do so with him. It may take a bit of time, but if clarity can occur, all the better. I am more than sure he is going to have intelligent questions about it I have not thought of before and that prospect rather excites me...
I am excited for you, Philo! Your thirst for understanding is inspiring! I am sure you and Don will have a productive partnership.
Last edited by Kishkumen on Tue May 17, 2022 3:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

Post by Kishkumen »

dastardly stem wrote:
Tue May 17, 2022 1:57 pm
I hear this and think, we'll always complicate things. We are just plain want to. But complicating them doesn't justify something like a spiritual realm. If we take the myth of Jesus rising from the dead and apply your questions, what results?
What is wrong with complications? What justifies simplification where complication exists? Why does acknowledging the existence of complication lead to accusations that one is trying to "justify" the spiritual realm?
Did Jesus rise up after he died, ascend to heaven and that was witnessed by people? No one is saying it's not a possible act. It's simply a question of whether it happened. It sounds like fanciful myth to me, given more meaning as time passed in religion. If one says "it happened metaphorically". I'm like, ok. What's it a metaphor of? How do we apply that to reality?
First of all, beyond your own decisions that you make for yourself, why should anyone be concerned that the resurrection sounds fanciful to you?

What the event means is up to the interpreter, and I don't have a problem with that. If I lack answers, I can look for my own. I can apply it to reality as I wish. Or, I can join others in living the consequences of adopting certain views. The choice is ours to do what we will, and I don't have a problem with that.

So, I ask you, why turn opportunities into problems?
Its the basis of a dominant world wide religion. If it didn't happen we can give up the religion as hearsay and drop all the unneeded and unhelpful aspects that have plagued us. We're simply better off dropping the spirit realm idea and living rationally.
Your answer falls entirely within the boundaries of your operative ideology, which I expected. You know (or assume you know) what rationality is, and you expect the world and everything in it to conform to your understanding of it.
Someone 2,000 years ago did not rise from the dead. That's simply myth, repeated thousands of times over by many people's perhaps most inspired by human's fear of death.
Did you see it not happen? People never die and come back to life? If it did happen, would that oblige you to be a Christian?
We can grant the event on the basis of possibility to argue for its utility. There is plenty more to do with it. But doing so doesn't answer the question of whether myth really happened and whether we should ever treat myth as a solid basis to define reality. We need to be serious and treat myth the other way around--as a tale with it's messages useful for our pursuit in reality. Not as a truth so we can pretend reality isn't real and what's really real is whatever we really want. Too often our wants are unreasonable and harmful.
So, everyone is obliged to operate with the same set of assumptions about rationality and reality that you do. As long as we don't allow other possibilities, you should be OK. We are safe. And that seems to be what is driving this. You woke up one day and realized, or came to believe, that your assumptions had been incorrect, and then you wanted to find a more reliable grounding. You chose currently popular ideas about rationality and reality. Now other options looks scary, and you don't want to go back to the scary place.
I am proposing there are more options. My question has been why pretend there is a spiritual realm? Not can we find meaning in myth. Sure we can. And ultimately I'm glad we have some room for agreement here, even if our disagreement feels a bit murky.
I am not sure what is wrong with pretending, if there is only mere pretending going on. On the other hand, maybe it is not "rational" to throw out all of the evidence of a spiritual realm that people have subjectively experienced.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Re: A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

Post by dastardly stem »

I realize we're basically having two similar conversations in two threads neither of which are topics on which we're discussing...but whatever I guess.
Kishkumen wrote:
Tue May 17, 2022 3:40 pm

What is wrong with complications? What justifies simplification where complication exists? Why does acknowledging the existence of complication lead to accusations that one is trying to "justify" the spiritual realm?
I didn't say anything was wrong with complication. I said we don't substitute reason because we can make things sound complicated. There is no good reason for a spirit realm simply because we can make things sound complicated.
First of all, beyond your own decisions that you make for yourself, why should anyone be concerned that the resurrection sounds fanciful to you?
They shouldn't. But they should care if it happened, particularly if they think it did happen and they base their whole existence on it happening.
What the event means is up to the interpreter, and I don't have a problem with that. If I lack answers, I can look for my own. I can apply it to reality as I wish. Or, I can join others in living the consequences of adopting certain views. The choice is ours to do what we will, and I don't have a problem with that.
I don't have a problem with it in theory. I have a problem with people elevating myth to reality simply because they really want myth to have really happened. And then, it appears, they reason through life by pretending a whole different world is out there. This leads to problems for us all in this life. People are lead to treat our world as lesser, as not-important because what is better is somethign they imagine, and what is important is a realm they can't justify but have imagined.
So, I ask you, why turn opportunities into problems?
I try not to. People turn opportunities into problems when they let their imagined world be their guide all too often.
Your answer falls entirely within the boundaries of your operative ideology, which I expected. You know (or assume you know) what rationality is, and you expect the world and everything in it to conform to your understanding of it.
I hope there is something called rational. And yes, I'd say, it's basically all we have. Whenever we communicate we try and reason. That'd be an explanation of what justifies rationality. That's what we do. It's what we have. And we might as well use it, I figure. To pretend there is something greater beyond reason seems silly.
Did you see it not happen? People never die and come back to life? If it did happen, would that oblige you to be a Christian?
An actual reason to think it happened, sufficient to justify the claim.
So, everyone is obliged to operate with the same set of assumptions about rationality and reality that you do. As long as we don't allow other possibilities, you should be OK. We are safe. And that seems to be what is driving this. You woke up one day and realized, or came to believe, that your assumptions had been incorrect, and then you wanted to find a more reliable grounding. You chose currently popular ideas about rationality and reality. Now other options looks scary, and you don't want to go back to the scary place.
Kind of, but I wouldn't call it a scary place. I'd say an irrational place. I'd rather stick with what we can see, as they say. There is where all our progress and solution will come. Not in make believe.
I am not sure what is wrong with pretending, if there is only mere pretending going on. On the other hand, maybe it is not "rational" to throw out all of the evidence of a spiritual realm that people have subjectively experienced.
Pretending is fine, as long as we accept that pretending isn't defining reality.
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Re: A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

Post by Kishkumen »

dastardly stem wrote:
Tue May 17, 2022 4:37 pm
I said we don't substitute reason because we can make things sound complicated. There is no good reason for a spirit realm simply because we can make things sound complicated.
Well, all of this was based on your dubious suppositions. I am not making things sound complicated gratuitously. I am saying that there are profound questions involved in these issues that one could conceivably spend a lifetime exploring, and that they will not be settled in a thread. That is not a bid to validate the spiritual realm by making things "sound complicated."

The latter is a really stupid misunderstanding of what I was doing.
But they should care if it happened, particularly if they think it did happen and they base their whole existence on it happening.
I think they care if it happened inasmuch as they trust it did, do not believe they have good reason to doubt it to the extent that skeptics do, and they enjoy the fruits of living a life of faith. I don't see anything inherently wrong with it. The insistence that there is a big problem here results from an extremist ideology of materialism and positivism dictating we should only act if we have material proof that something is an absolute fact.
I don't have a problem with it in theory. I have a problem with people elevating myth to reality simply because they really want myth to have really happened. And then, it appears, they reason through life by pretending a whole different world is out there. This leads to problems for us all in this life. People are lead to treat our world as lesser, as not-important because what is better is somethign they imagine, and what is important is a realm they can't justify but have imagined.
I say we pick our battles wisely. Battling mythology is not a good bet. Unless it can be shown that something is truly deleterious, we should perhaps not declare ideological war on it. People do not treat our world as lesser simply because they believe it is a smaller part of a larger whole. They don't elevate its importance simply because the think it is all there is. All of this stuff is, actually, more complicated than that. Declaring war on myth in order to rid the world of it because that would make it alright is just a quixotic crusade. It won't work.
People turn opportunities into problems when they let their imagined world be their guide all too often.
Uncontextualized assertion.
I hope there is something called rational. And yes, I'd say, it's basically all we have. Whenever we communicate we try and reason. That'd be an explanation of what justifies rationality. That's what we do. It's what we have. And we might as well use it, I figure. To pretend there is something greater beyond reason seems silly.
I am not questioning the existence of rationality. I am doubting your understanding of the issue beyond your assumptions.
An actual reason to think it happened, sufficient to justify the claim.
The literature says there were witnesses. So that is an actual reason to think it happened. As with many things that happened millennia ago, it would be difficult to prove it happened. I spend all day trying to make sense out of ancient evidence as written in texts and contained in archaeological reports. So much one takes for granted may not be factually true, and yet extreme skepticism is also unwarranted.
Kind of, but I wouldn't call it a scary place. I'd say an irrational place. I'd rather stick with what we can see, as they say. There is where all our progress and solution will come. Not in make believe.
I don't think it is irrational. It follows its own logic. The trick is to find the places where one is likely to make a positive difference. Saying Christianity is false is a bad place to look.
Pretending is fine, as long as we accept that pretending isn't defining reality.
Pretending is a part of reality. Real people really pretend all the time.
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Re: A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

Post by Physics Guy »

The word "myth" has a few different meanings.

There are myths like the kind that mythbusters busted: nobody attaches any meaning to them except the literal one, some people think they are literally true, but they are in fact demonstrably false. And there are myths like the Midgard Serpent: popular stories that probably nobody ever actually believed and that certainly no-one believes nowadays in any literal way.

I'm not sure I want to use the word "myth" for anything outside those two categories, actually, but there is certainly a lot of room for statements to be true in some important ways while simultaneously being false in other ways.

Sometimes this happens because somebody was trying to be completely right, and fell short of that goal, but did get some things right. In that kind of case one can pick out the right bits and discard the wrong bits, but often it's hard to separate them completely just because of how the whole thing was expressed. If some of the statement's verbs are okay, but the nouns are all wrong, you still can't use the verbs without some kind of noun. So you end up repeating the whole sentence and then adding that the nouns are all wrong. A lot of old scientific theories are still taught and used today in this way.

Another way for a partially right statement to persist is that its mistakes are kind of included on purpose, with qualifications like "it is as if X were true" rather than "X is true". One of the few strong candidates for "biggest insight of all science" is that reality seems to have a sort of onion structure, with many nesting layers of description, each optimal within its own range of scales. Fluid mechanics, for example, does not mention molecules. It treats fluids as continuous stuff. Historically in some periods it really has been understood to contradict the molecular theory of matter, but today it is based on the understanding that molecular matter behaves, on some scales, as if it were continuous.

The replacement of molecules with continuous fluid density is not taken literally nowadays. It's just a convenient abbreviation. This convenience is really important, though, because by ignoring the molecular structure of fluids, and focusing on average densities and velocities and so on, we can describe and even predict a lot of important phenomena that we couldn't otherwise grasp at all. Even if our brains could somehow hold the picture of bazillions of jostling molecules, we would be unable to see the forest for the trees, as it were. Important big-picture trends like lift and drag would be lost in the irrelevant noise of all the individual molecular trajectories. The big-picture theory that is literally false, because matter isn't really continuous, is in fact the only way we have to discuss larger-scale and more complex phenomena.

Refusing to use the continuous language and talk about fluid mechanical concepts like pressure and viscosity, because continuous fluids don't exist and only molecules are real, isn't actually being more rational or rigorous or scientific. It's just refusing to think at all about a lot of real and important phenomena about which we can in fact understand an awful lot, by embracing the higher-level description. The conclusions of fluid mechanics aren't false. They are true. Pressure and viscosity are real things. The exact way in which they are real isn't the simple way that you would guess if fluid mechanics were all that you knew, but after you go through some statistical mechanics you can see Ah, yes, it works. Then you can close the hood and go on driving the car without thinking about the spark plugs every time you step on the gas.

Fluid mechanics isn't a fluke example. Physics is so full of similar scenarios that I'm boggling at trying to list examples, because the task would be to list examples of physics, period. Everything is like that. There are layers and layers. And in a real sense the deepest theory we currently have (renormalizable quantum field theory) is a statement that it is "turtles all the way down". Within physics one can generally trace the transitions from one layer to the next, translating one language into another exactly, so that one can kind of step from one stone to the next without ever having to jump. As we move up the ladder of science into more complex disciplines like chemistry and biology, though, the translation gets trickier. You have to wave your hands around as you step. Eventually you're just juggling models that are justified by decent agreement with sparse observations, and nobody is taking anything literally as anything more than that.

So, I wouldn't want to call fluid mechanics or any of our other so-called "effective theories" a myth, exactly. People would get the idea that I was talking about something like Zeus screwing swans or swallowed gum staying seven years in your stomach. But effective theories like fluid mechanics are examples of how truth and fiction can be mixed together more subtly than one might naïvely expect, even in physics.

Sometimes a lot of people only know the effective theory and can't explain how it relates to the deeper but more complicated theory. I once had a frustrating conversation with an MIT doctoral student in aeronautical engineering about how wings generate lift. I wanted to know why more air molecules ended up bouncing harder against the bottom side of the wing than the top, and the guy just couldn't seem to understand my questions at all. In some cases literally no-one knows the underlying theory. We're at this stage with gravity now.

That doesn't mean that the higher-level theory is false. Airplanes fly. The earth goes round the sun.
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Re: A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

Post by dastardly stem »

Kishkumen wrote:
Tue May 17, 2022 8:31 pm
dastardly stem wrote:
Tue May 17, 2022 4:37 pm
I said we don't substitute reason because we can make things sound complicated. There is no good reason for a spirit realm simply because we can make things sound complicated.
Well, all of this was based on your dubious suppositions. I am not making things sound complicated gratuitously. I am saying that there are profound questions involved in these issues that one could conceivably spend a lifetime exploring, and that they will not be settled in a thread. That is not a bid to validate the spiritual realm by making things "sound complicated."

The latter is a really stupid misunderstanding of what I was doing.
But they should care if it happened, particularly if they think it did happen and they base their whole existence on it happening.
I think they care if it happened inasmuch as they trust it did, do not believe they have good reason to doubt it to the extent that skeptics do, and they enjoy the fruits of living a life of faith. I don't see anything inherently wrong with it. The insistence that there is a big problem here results from an extremist ideology of materialism and positivism dictating we should only act if we have material proof that something is an absolute fact.
I don't have a problem with it in theory. I have a problem with people elevating myth to reality simply because they really want myth to have really happened. And then, it appears, they reason through life by pretending a whole different world is out there. This leads to problems for us all in this life. People are lead to treat our world as lesser, as not-important because what is better is somethign they imagine, and what is important is a realm they can't justify but have imagined.
I say we pick our battles wisely. Battling mythology is not a good bet. Unless it can be shown that something is truly deleterious, we should perhaps not declare ideological war on it. People do not treat our world as lesser simply because they believe it is a smaller part of a larger whole. They don't elevate its importance simply because the think it is all there is. All of this stuff is, actually, more complicated than that. Declaring war on myth in order to rid the world of it because that would make it alright is just a quixotic crusade. It won't work.
People turn opportunities into problems when they let their imagined world be their guide all too often.
Uncontextualized assertion.
I hope there is something called rational. And yes, I'd say, it's basically all we have. Whenever we communicate we try and reason. That'd be an explanation of what justifies rationality. That's what we do. It's what we have. And we might as well use it, I figure. To pretend there is something greater beyond reason seems silly.
I am not questioning the existence of rationality. I am doubting your understanding of the issue beyond your assumptions.
An actual reason to think it happened, sufficient to justify the claim.
The literature says there were witnesses. So that is an actual reason to think it happened. As with many things that happened millennia ago, it would be difficult to prove it happened. I spend all day trying to make sense out of ancient evidence as written in texts and contained in archaeological reports. So much one takes for granted may not be factually true, and yet extreme skepticism is also unwarranted.
Kind of, but I wouldn't call it a scary place. I'd say an irrational place. I'd rather stick with what we can see, as they say. There is where all our progress and solution will come. Not in make believe.
I don't think it is irrational. It follows its own logic. The trick is to find the places where one is likely to make a positive difference. Saying Christianity is false is a bad place to look.
Pretending is fine, as long as we accept that pretending isn't defining reality.
Pretending is a part of reality. Real people really pretend all the time.
I certainly appreciate the back and forth. I realize we spoke passed each other a bit. I don't see that as a big problem. I'll just sum up my position here, in hopes to clarify where i"m coming from.

You say:
The insistence that there is a big problem here results from an extremist ideology of materialism and positivism dictating we should only act if we have material proof that something is an absolute fact.
That's basically the opposite of where i'm coming from. Let me explain. As i see it, those who propound a spirit realm do so by suggesting they really think it and feel it therefore it is real. I'd say, more likely they think it and feel it, as in dream it and imagine it. On a matter of probability that'd suggest Its more probable that those who have experienced a "spirit realm" are imagining it since there is no reason to think another world actually exists. If there were a good reason to think a spirit world exists, I have yet to see a good reason, a good argument made on it. This way of thinking of it, in no way dismisses what people are claiming, as I see it. They experience something...sure. But we all experience dreams and visions, hopes and imaginative worlds. That's simply a function of the mind, it appears. On none of this am I saying we can't rely on anything unless we can treat it as absolute fact. That completely obscures the points I've raised. In my mind, I'm saying the opposite.

I maintain that a better world for each us is to accept a rational disposition in all things. It is in my mind, irrational to accept a world we can in no way verify. That's not strictly positivism, as I see it. It's simply playing probabilities. Its more likely that imagined worlds are just that imagined and aren't real, at this point. Unless we find god reason to think people's imagined worlds have some basis in reality, it seems much more likely the imagined is simply imagined.
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Re: A New Smear Article: Interpreter Targets Givens and Hauglid

Post by Kishkumen »

First of all, stem, let me say that I really like you, and I think you are a good egg. I just disagree with you completely on this point. You are telling me that there is part of reality you and others consider unreal and irrational. In doing so you are following a fashionable ideology. Lots of very smart people agree with you. I don’t, but that’s OK. To the contrary, I find it bizarre to downgrade a whole segment of the real world and human experience as silly stuff that no one should take seriously as real.

You place the mind and imagination in an inferior category. If it’s “made up,” to you it is not worthy of consideration. With a standard like that, humanity would have made very little progress. Much that we take for granted as bearing on the most important principles underlying reality was imagined in the human mind before it was demonstrated in other ways. That tells me there is something important going on in the imagination and the human mind, something mysterious even.

Stuff we categorize as religion is not utterly separate from the rest. Religion is a “made up” category. It has its uses, but I don’t accept that the religious is by definition less real and less worthy of consideration in an age of different priorities and new myths/ideologies.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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