Thanks for your note. I continue to be amazed that some people find it
invalid to distinguish between gravity and God. What is so unclear here?
I don't get it. Gravity IS, and everything works in concert with its
predictable presence. 'God' is a term that is meaningful to some people
and not to others, but can be shown not to have the same status as the
gravity principle.
That's all I'm saying. If you disagree, then I guess you're the kind of
person who creates their own private standards and universe, and lives
according to them, with proof assumed.
I personally don't care what people base their life on. But as one who
aspires to a rational, science-oriented life, and wants to learn from
what others have, authentically, found out, I need to be able to tell the
difference between claims, in language, that are grounded in myth/belief
and those which are grounded in paradigm/fact. Then I am free to choose
which ones to go with. But when the nature of the claim's grounding is
hidden from me, or misrepresented (however unintentionally), I feel
disrespected, disempowered, and angry. It just doesn't make sense.
That's my view, Lois. What do you say? Best, Gary
PS As I told Devi, I'm strongly considering giving up this inquiry on
the true grounding for PCP. It's too much like work and seems to be
about as popular as a fart in church. gb
Shawver wrote:
>
> Gary,
>
> Well, I would often feel stifled, myself, if I have to decide if
> something is "religion" or "science". Sometimes it would be like trying
> to decide if a book is a cup or a chair. I feel a need to stretch to at
> least half a dozen categories of knowledge before I feel I can make any
> sense of our categories.
>
> In addition to "religion", I would want, at least, "romanticism" (or call
> it phenomenology or existentialism -- we would need a name to lump them
> together). I think this is the basis of old fashioned (as in Protagoras
> as represented by Plato's dialogue) relativism. It is the sense that
> human consciousnessness is the measure of all things. It sometimes leads
> to a kind of solipsism. People in psychology who work within this realm
> talk of "awareness" and discuss the possibility of "empathic reading of
> others". There is a lot of this inward introspectionism in psychological
> theory and I would be hard pressed where to classify it if I was
> restricted to the dichotomy of "religion vs. science".
>
> What do you think?
>
> ..Lois Shawver
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