On Apr 3, 2005, at 9:09 PM, Dan Minette wrote:
From: "Doug Pensinger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Pffft. Developing implies some sort of progress. We're backsliding.
Out of curiosity, how is that possible if you don't believe in truth?
Um, what?
I assume here you mean some kind of godly entity, rather than "truth", because you used the term "believe in".
You don't have to believe in a god to know that if someone robs you, it sucks. If someone molests your granddaughter, you want to feed him his genitals. If someone kills your best friend, or you, it's awful.
I don't see how you have to fall back on phantoms for any of the foregoing to be obvious.
By extension, then, we don't -- or should not -- do those things to others, because they are ethically bankrupt actions. All it takes is a little empathy to understand how the victim must feel in those situations. I wouldn't like anyone doing anything like that to anyone I know, so it's clear to me that those are behaviors I should not do unto others. ;)
Again, why does there have to be a "belief" in "truth" for the above to be so?
On a somewhat more general level, social breakdowns do happen, and again, they don't have to be judged against some kind of phantom "truth" to be seen as bad things. Hitler was just plain evil, and what he and the Nazis perpetrated was an atrocity. There's no reason to pull a deity or "truth" into the courtroom to indict him and his cohort.
This nation is slipping -- or at least parts of it are -- into an anti-intellectual morass of just-so mysticism heavily rooted in a very narrow interpretation of *one* eclectic, eccentric religious tome. Evolution taught in classrooms may be "just a theory" (which by the way is incorrect; evolution is a fact), but "intelligent design" isn't even that, and yet it's supposed to get equal time?
IMAX movies can't show a film detailing current models about Earth's development -- incidentally mentioning the fact of evolution -- because of right-wing fundamentalist outcry?
The US congress, in a blatant violation of separation of powers, attempts to meddle with decisions that have been reaffirmed for nearly a decade by state and federal courts, all in the name of keeping a hunk of meat warm?
I don't see any need to revert to superstition to judge that *all* the foregoing are indications of problems. There's no need to "believe" in a "truth" to know that there's trouble afoot.
That said, I suspect Doug was being tongue-in-cheek, as I was.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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