From: Walter Watts (wlwatts@cox.net)
Date: Sat Jun 08 2002 - 05:45:39 MDT
Correction by Confucious (Jake) much kinder and just as accurate as
correction by Jake's uncle, Joe, who hasn't been seen for a while (me
thinks he's walking the earth for a second or third time). Here's what
uncle joe would've pulled out.....
PS--I miss you Joe Dees!
Walter
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The moment you started babeling about imperceptible,
undetectable or existentially untestable "light-beings', you placed
yourself and your contentions in the same territory of the
unverifiable/unfalsifiable which is more familiarly inhabited by such
obtuse and dense denizens as fundies and fanatics. You have
placed your dogmatic doctrine foursquare in the realm of belief,
rather than knowledge (see Greimas, ON MEANING, and Popper,
THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY and CONJECTURES
AND REFUTATIONS), and there is nothing left to differentiate you from
them, not even trendiness or an air of futuristic eliteness
(which are seductively but not too subtly engineered flag stance
emoters, nothing more).
>From here on in, if you persist in such willful evanescence, your
further residence on this list will, at least in part, proceed as
follows:
Your professed beliefs will be poked and probed, and your various
responses duly noted, collated and compiled; in short, you will
become a specimen. We collect belief systems here, as objects
of academic interest. The relatively strange and rare, due to their
novelty, hold a special interest for us. Your deepest, most closely
held and most dearly cherished beliefs and faiths will be exposed
to the klieg lights of logic and scientific knowledge (and we stay
current on both fronts), and you will be categorized and pinned to a
wall seven ways from sunday like some unusual insect that had
the terminal misfortune to stray before the gaze of an avid
lepidopterist. The experience will ossify and ultimately fossilize
you, because we will keep meticulous track of everything you and
your website say, and will be perpetually vigilant for logical
contradictions, empirical absurdities and factual errors. You will
become an object here; an object of a superficially provocative (for
the sake of interesting responses), but essentially detached,
dispassionate, comprehensive and thorough group study, which will
spare your sensibilities and feelings not one whit. You will meet
sympathetic, antipathetic, and inscrutable interlocuters, all of
which are specifically self-tailored to provoke the fullest range of
responses of which you are capable, for the purpose of plumbing
your belief-structure to the point that it becomes completely
transparent to us, and can be pigeonholed and placed. Then when
the apple of your faith is cored, when you have nothing new or
different or interesting to say about what you believe, nothing we
have not heard in some form before, you will be marginalized and
discarded, will receive no responses to your entreaties, and will
eventually wither and drop away.
The rest of the list will be pissed at me for warning you about
this, because I may be more than depriving them of mere sport, but
of a chance to fill a gap in their belif spectrum, but you seem like a
nice guy, and you have a sense of humor, which is sorely lacking
in garden-variety zealots, and I felt that if you decide to stay here
for a while and endure deconstruction, you deserve the privilege of
doing so without a blindfold.
Jkr438@aol.com wrote:
> [Hermit] Certainly, if you had bothered to peruse the previously
> supplied
> synopsis, you would have discovered that "faith" is not required or
> helpful
> in science (if you choose to disagree, please indicate at which step
> in the
> process "faith" is required)
>
> [ben] At some point in the scientific process, 'faith' is certainly
> required. We must have faith in our observations and in our
> instruments. You
> can trace the chain all the way back if you must, but as some point
> you have
> to give up and say 'I believe my observations to be correct because I
> have
> faith in (insert program/scope/meter/etc - or even 'my own 5 senses')
>
> [Jake] I would suggest that you have switched into a usage of "faith"
> that really is synonymous with "confidence." Indeed this word would
> seem better as it does not carry the stronger religious implications
> of the word "faith." In religious terms faith is generally not
> dependent on evidence, repeatable experiences, etc. Confidence on the
> other hand is generally justified by such things.
>
> -Jake
-- Walter Watts Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc. "No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Sep 25 2002 - 13:28:47 MDT