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To: ProDeath who wrote (69)	4/29/2004 3:56:56 AM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 197

If you're talking (rather than defending yourself with a sword or a Mac 10) you have to dance around that stuff "delicately" because if you get too emphatic, then you're doing the same thing they are: pretending to know something, when ignorance and ambiguity are all humans really have. Many of us can't tolerate that well, so we tend to divide up into groups that possess a 'Truth' that serves as Advil for our biggest cognitive irritant. If our Truth is contradicted by somebody else's, that's a threat, so we kill each other. I think this is a much bigger issue than economic 'scarcity', especially these days. The core superstitions are neither particularly primitive nor particularly Semitic. They're what humans do. Beavers build dams, ants build anthills, humans organize things cognitively and achieve great and beautiful things (created Friday morning in God's image, you know). But the other side of the same coin that buys us science and art is an intolerance for mysteries and questions that can't be cognitively organized. This intolerance exists in all human populations, distributed by individual along some unknown curve. Workarounds for that irritant take different shapes, some benign, some destructive. Take enough individuals with low tolerance for ambiguity who have chosen or been bequeathed a destructive modality for working around it, and you get death cults like the Rapture Rangers (in the extreme case; there's plenty of similarly toxic sludge all along the spectrum). That's our defining flaw and biggest challenge. Or not. This is off topic. I hope the moderator doesn't bar me. Who cares? :-) --QS