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

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (96428)	4/26/2003 4:21:29 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

OT <a logical contradiction is found unacceptable by most> Unfortunately, I find counter-examples of that, on every page of every newspaper I pick up. <It is not the observation per se that is often in dispute> Oh, yes, it is. For instance, look at all the people now being released from prison, who were convicted of murder on the evidence of eye-witnesses, sometimes multiple eye-witnesses, and now DNA testing proves their innocence. Innumerable times, I have talked to a group of people, who were all at the same event at the same time. If it was a highly emotional event, and if the participants had different biases, wanted different outcomes, had their egos invested in different ideas, then it is commonplace for them to describe the event in totally different ways. I don't mean different conclusions. I mean different facts, like who was there, what was said, what order the events happened in. Ask for the details, in such situations, and it is amazing how many different stories you get told. Our minds are a filter. The neurons of the brain can process only a small fraction of the individual data points collected by the eyes and ears. The filter works by finding patterns, and ignoring anything that doesn't fit the pattern. So, every minute of every day, we are ignoring most of what we see. Where do those patterns come from? From our history: water running accross a flat plain creates channels, and later water follows the existing channels. So: we mostly see what we expected to see, and it takes a great dissonance to make us see anything new.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (96428)	4/26/2003 4:50:44 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

OT <I am sorry, but I never accepted that definition> That's because you are Enlightened, and have lost the certainty of the pre-Enlightened and UnEnlightened. That certainty has tremendous, perhaps universal, appeal. As almost everyone in the streets of Karbala will tell you. A religion has to explain everything. The only practical way to do that, is to repeatedly resort to saying, "Only God knows why He did that." Or to have some person at the top of a heirarchy, a person who gets to speak for God. The strength of Secular Humanism is its flexibility. Every postulate, every assumption, every theory, can be thrown out if the facts change, without weakening belief in Secular Humanism. None of the other religions have that flexibility. The only ones that come close, are the ones that say God in unknowable, admitting that every person, even the most holy and powerful, can make mistakes about what God wants. The problem here, is that this very flexibility undermines the sense of certainty. And erodes Earthly Order and Stability. It's a trade-off.