People who seek the TRVTH outside the rhelm of verifiable knowledge give me the heebie jeebies, like the folks who flew airplanes into the WTC.
I have a simple way of catagorizing people. There is a scale of good and evil, and people are born somewhere along the line, perhaps shoved this way or that by upbringing or experience. There is a scale for conscience and empathy. Scales for verbal and mathematical reasoning, scales for physical, musical and various other talents -- all of which have an inborn component and a component due to training.
The thing that separates my view of people from the view of the crowd is that I believe that little or nothing of a persons merit on any of these scales is correlated with ideas and beliefs. Nothing that makes a person good or kind or interesting or valuable is at all related to belief in any religious dogma or adherence to a political or philosophical ideology.
For proof, you need go no further than thes threads, where the best people in the world can't agree on anything.
I have a simple way of catagorizing people. There is a scale of good and evil...
I don't know how to say this without offending you, and that is not my intent, but how can you say "good" and "evil" without giving yourself the "heebie jeebies"?
Cordially,
" . . . progress in certainty is gained by renouncing the knowledge of anything as whole . . genuinely philosophic, since it reflects on human deficiency in the light of the highest ambitions." -- R. L. Velkley, "Richard Kennington on Modern Origins" in The Political Science Reviewer 2002 available at Barnes and Noble.********************************************************* Proof as such is the colossus of little man representing his rage against the universe, the conclusion of his doubt in the face of an overwhelming existence. Proof is the pill for discontent of mind, the intellectual embrace of simplicity, the willful erasure of elemental evidence in naive experience, the satisfaction in the humanized safety against terror, the sugared pretense that knowledge is uberalles, the political Mauer to guard against the world that spins us all."As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation, at first by socialism and then by Communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say in 1844 that "Communism is naturalized humanism." This statement turned out to be not entirely meaningless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism [renouncing knowledge of the whole] and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under Communist regimes reaches the stage of anti-religious dictatorship; concentration on social structures, with a seemingly scientific approach (this is typical of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and of Marxism) . . . . Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart