salyavin, I love what you've written here and through all these exchanges your love for this world comes through, as it has many times before. For this reason I have thoroughly enjoyed this thread and am grateful that you hang in here with us lot (-:
OTOH, wrt your third to last parapgraph, I don't think there's one iota of devotion, blind or otherwise, involved in burning anyone at the stake! On Wednesday, September 24, 2014 6:58 AM, salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote: ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <fleetwood_macncheese@...> wrote : The world is as we are. So if we think water will come out of a tap upwards it will? Anyone dismissing unexplained phenomena out of hand, is simply trying to limit their options, and put some mental boundaries in place. Who has dismissed anything out of hand? Oftentimes this is achieved by picking an obvious fraud, and using this to bolster the boundary. Ah, so we all know it's a fraud now. Which magical happenings aren't frauds then? Is having a well defined sense of what is and isn't possible a bad thing? Maybe you don't care about knowledge at all. Go figure. Feeling as if we know very little, scares some people, and makes them feel as if they are out of control. So who is it that knows very little, the ones who think that food is optional or the ones who know that water flows downhill? Those on here spinning pages of words about the unscientific nature, and therefore falseness, of anything without a scientific explanation, are simply afraid, masking fear with anger, or arrogance. It happens a lot. :-) Ah yes, masking fear. That must be it. Actually, I can see what's happening and it's a familiarly depressing story. People with cherished beliefs about magic don't like having them explained as being hoaxes or delusions and accuse the (generally) scientific types who have bothered to learn a few things and want to explain it of being narrow-minded or limited in some way. You see it all the time in creationist arguments too. The funny thing is it's the "You can't prove fairies don't exist" crowd that lacks the imagination to grasp big concepts and the underlying awesomeness of creation. I used to know this TM girl and she would enthuse endlessly about Hagelin and his mad dribble, "But he's Harvard trained!" she'd protest. And a deluded cult zombie too, I'd point out. I'd then try and explain about what quantum theory actually says or lend her a book about the hard won understanding of nature we currently have but she'd just say she was more interested in spiritual physics. "But it's boring compared to John" she'd wail. That's the problem right there, anyone who thinks reality is boring or that science has it all explained is an idiot who walks around with their eyes closed. People want there to be fairies at the bottom of the garden because it makes it "better". I don't get it, I'd rather know the truth even if it means there's no magic at all but I've found the universe and all the life on Earth to be amazing enough as it is. And the journey isn't finished, and the joy of science is we'll never really know if it is finished. We are all different, you either love the wondrous universe that science has revealed or you prefer the invented authority of the mystics and religious Joe's who keep a thoroughly closed and uneducated mind about everything that means a belief their ego relies on might get shut down. What depresses me is the anti-science crowd miss out on so much, imagine if the catholic church had had their way and stopped anyone speculating about the size of the universe and what stars are? How poor would we be now! Every time you look into the night sky and understand what you are seeing is because someone got burned at the stake by a True Believer. That's when science started, when curiousity overcame blind devotion. I still have the hunger for knowledge I had when I was a kid, a week rarely goes by when I don't look at the moon through my telescope or read a new book about something I know nothing about. How scared and arrogant of me! That's my lunch break almost over, time for a coffee, shall I hold the kettle above the tap or below it?
