Ed Weick wrote:
>
> Keith:
>
> > 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 there is a universal human tendency to want to convert good and
> interesting thought to repressive dogma. If I were an existentialist, I'd
> say that this because, fundamentally, people cannot cope with the finitude
> and uncertainty of being.
[snip]
For once I think maybe I am the optimist -- at least
theoretically....
I think we know very little about "universal human tendencies".
All we know is what humans become in various flavors of
primitive and repressive social environments. There is
a literature about childrearing that would seem fairly
large if books were fewer, which argues in this direction:
Frederick Leboyer, Lloyd DeMause, Alice Miller....
Donald Winnicott's and Heinz Kohut's work are strongly
even if more obliquely supportive, and even Melanie Klein
has some remarkable things to say here. John Dewey and
Paolo Freire would probably agree as well.
But for ourselves, most if not all of whom have been
in varying degrees crippled and distorted by our
childrearing, we who have Freudian personality
structures with punitive superegos (introjected
parental tor-mentors) and even today are
insecure in our social security, we need to struggle
against our tendencies to do such things as "convert
good and interesting thought into dogma".
I have been an existentialist (the "atheist",
not the Christian kind!) for over 35 years. I am
more and more convinced that "the finitude and uncertainty
of being" are not nearly as anxiety producing
in general as banal economic and emotional insecurity.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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