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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (96425)	4/26/2003 4:00:10 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<At least as far back as Plato, some people have believed that pure reasoning is superior to other discovery methods> But Plato was not a scientist, and certainly not Enlightenmnet, which was a 18th-Century meme. Science begins with gathering a mass of observations about the grubby confusing reality around us. Plato never did that, none of the old Greeks did, nobody much did until the Enlightenment. Pure Reason leads to elegant self-consistent thought systems that have nil correlation with reality. Plato and Aristotle, using pure logic, came to some really weird conclusions about the world, conclusions that are disproved easily with a little bit of data-gathering. <The problem with believing creationism is that it boils down to "I believe in Bible because Christ said so, and I believe in Christ because Bible says so".> No, that isn't why you don't believe in creationism. It is internally self-consistent, as you say. If you accepted their assumptions, you'd accept all of it, and not worry about fossils or Koalas. Those are just "talking points", that you thought up later. Creationism is part of a larger meme, a wholistic worldview, and you don't find that worldview satisfying. Having made that decision, you look for the weak points of that worldview, to focus you criticism on, and find Creationism. It's about memes, the Darwinian competition among ideas. It isn't about logic at all. <If 10 years from now I look back and see the neocon solution worked, I will be making major changes to my beliefs.> It won't take 10 years, to say whether we are bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. Look at the relevant examples of the recent past. As soon as we re-instated the Emir of Kuwait, you could conclude that, no matter how long you waited, the result was not going to be freedom or democracy. As soon as the warlord armies re-assembled in Afghanistan, in the weeks after Kandahar fell, you could conclude that democracy or freedom (or stability or prosperity) had been pruned from the range of possible futures. <The Gaians> Many new ideas came out of the 1960s, and most of them have been abandoned. That's what happens in a period of radiative evolution of memes. Peace, for instance, seems to have failed, all the lessons we learned in Vietnam have been unlearned. But two BigIdeas that began there, have thrived: feminism and environmentalism. Gaia, the worship of Mother Earth, welds those two ideas together. Few people find Secular Humanism to be a satisfying replacement for Christianity. As the fundamentalists (Islamic and Christian) point out, communities of Seculars don't have much community. So, I see Secularism failing, it just doesn't answer the need. The choices are: a return to fundamentalism, or SomethingNew, which could be Gaia, or Buddha, or a return to the polytheism that was the norm before two militant monotheisms conquered the planet. I feel lucky, to be living in what is probably the most interesting time in human history ever. And to have the freedom and time, to take advantage of so many of the unique opportunities. Like talking to you.