At 09:39 06/01/02 -0500, you wrote: (SK) <<<< As usual, I enjoy reading your [BmcC] comments. What is mindboggling to me is most humans devotion to religion,(incl you as evidenced by your sig file quotes.) The leap of faith required to believe in dogmatically derived absolute values of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics is perhaps the highest order result of parental and societal conditioning. >>>> (EW) <<<< There is, IMHO, another understanding of religion, an alternative to inculcated dogmatism and perhaps its anathema. This is religion as groping toward answers to profound mystery. Dogma prescribes boundaries that cannot take you very far. You become very uncomfortable if the boundaries are overstepped. Reason can take you a whole lot further, but it too eventually reaches its limits. Then you are left with mystery, and yet you can't just walk away. You still want to know what lies there. It is at that point that you confront God. >>>>
Yes, indeed. Those who are atheists are being just as dogmatic as those Believers who say that non-Believers are damned. But we can't trust language. It contains verbal paradoxes and depend on assumptions that cannot be proved. Language and logic are useful crutches and help us to get by from day to day, but are no more than that. But language allows us to construct our own metaphors and every individual who bothers to construct a metaphor has a belief that is as valid as anyone else's -- so long as he doesn't try to impose those beliefs on others. The metaphors become invalid because religions then become Religions -- that is, political systems. For most of their history, religions have guarded their power as implacably as any government. In 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome by the Christian Church for his "obstinate and pertinacious heresies". He'd conjectured: "There are countless constellations, suns and planets; we see only the suns because they give light; the planets remain invisible, for they are small and dark. There are also numberless earths circling around their suns, no worse and no less than this globe of ours." And the situation today is not a great deal better in many parts of the world. Islamic women are still being stoned to death and Hindu women are still being burned alive for reasons of breaking religious codes. In modern times, scientific metaphors are more humane. They don't lay down inflexible moral laws. They have a better chance than theological ones of being shared voluntarily among civilised peoples. Scientific metaphors also make for a truly universal language. And, if we ever met aliens from outer space (so long as they were from the same universe!), then scientific metaphors would be mutually understood. But at the end of the day, even the metaphors of science are insufficient because they themselves reveal that there are problems that cannot be explained. That we are aware of insoluble problems and that we are conscious of limits to our knowledge are, to my mind, the greatest mysteries of all. Keith Hudson __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
