Roy

Well, of course. Without a consciousness, you couldn't determine a legitimate use of a concept, could you? Reality is often taken to be the last thing we think is true, as the history of science has often demonstrated. Instead of reality, we simply are taken by our opinion of it. So, as I said: as the historical course of science demonstrates, "reality" and its perception is an ongoing affair. Heisenberg proved that electrons and other sub-atomic particles have no distinct boundaries and are ontologically uncertain (as opposed to epistemologically uncertain). Having no absolutely distinct attributes, there is no necessary effect to be predicted as there is no certain cause to serve as antecedent. So, the original concept of the uncuttability of the matter at some point got modified several thousand years after its original conception. In other words, "reality" took a while to catch up with the concept and "reality" struck, the concept of uncuttability got modified. So, the concept underwent revision. That means that the opposite idea had to be admitted and that the understanding of the phenomenon of the electron and of matter itself changed. The same could be said of light. It is seen antinomiously as both particle and wave. This means that warring concepts have been reconciled. Concepts historically turn out often to be as I stated: tools which need to be used properly. Usually this means that the validity of an opposite notion must be admitted and integrated at some point. Roy

Really I don't understand why I have been warned about ad hominem attacks, and yet, you continue to criticize me on my capacity to proofread or whatever in the middle of a bout of the flu. Do you actually have anything to say of a respectful nature that is relevant to the ongoing arguement? That would be a change of pace and appreciated. Your third comment of an ad hominem nature. I think I should alert the administrator. Roy

Judging religion in balance means accounting for its good and evil aspects. A study of the evolution of Europe such as A History of Private Life may increase your appreciation of Christian contribution to the welfare of Europe. About concepts. Yes, it is too fast. Concepts are often not in themselves true or false but used badly or well depending on context. So, Redcap, you are doing here what you have just complained that others had done to you in argument- straw men. It is as Buckminster Fuller said about pollution. It is just something useful and good found in the wrong place or in the wrong concentration. Ever since physics became antinomial in its fundamental concepts, the truly modern interpreter has been forced to acknowledge that- as one physicist put it- "the opposite of a good idea is a bad one, but the opposite of a great idea is another great idea". So, I guess whether the phenomenon in question is false depends on whether it is a simple good idea or a great one. Most myths, as Einstein understood and Campbell and Jung have argued well, belong in the great category. In any case, RadCap, understanding ourselves in our historic context means seeing how thought and understanding evolved and not putting ourselves outside of history. To do otherwise is hubris and much of America's success in avoiding fascism and communism has come from a pragmatic approach that doesn't put all in intellecual formula. Europe, as one of Jung's patients dreamed, was a place of unbridled intellect and idealism which had to fall into fascism and communism. Have you never been shocked by the wisdom in some myth or story that seems idiotic or simple after you have been forced to or had the good luck to understand? As I said, let's take a myth and see what your refined intellects here at your forum can say about it. Roy

Radcap, According to what I read in Michael Polyani's book about thirty years ago, there was a difference of 9 meters/second on the two sides of the Michaelson-Morley experiment. Polyani wrote that this difference (at that time) was simply not discussed as it went against all the "ether" ideas. Have you read this or heard about it? Roy

I thought Ayn Rand's followers were big on Nietzsche. The tragic world view holds that tragedy is an indispensable part of life. That life is a pot into which we are thrown to experience good and evil, and that that is the will of the gods. Conflict is not always avoidable. It is difficult to grasp the import of it without a thorough study of Nietzsche. The early 70's book, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology deals with the issue well on a practical level. Platonic philosphy was the result of the rejection by Socrates and his followers of that point of view because it made god good and evil. God had to be good, and if society in its reality was imperfect, it was because its members had incompletely realized the need to find that corrective to the real to bring it to the level of the ideal. It leads to the tyranny of idealism in an actual tyrant or demogogue who is seen as the philosoper prince. Take a look at the US Food and Drug Administration for an example of that mentality in action. Marxism and many aspects of western religion are similar. Art is not the product of the conscious mind anymore than your dreams are at night. They are images mediated to some extent by the conscious mind, but that is not the same thing. Most artist are not good at thinking at all. This observation is consistent with the idea that art is for the most part not conscious. If you read a book such as We, you could come to understand how much of a message in time a work of art may be without any of its members or participants being able to voice the source of the fascination, especially its own artists. Tristan and Iseult was the myth, and I don't have time right now to recount the story in the detail that is needed to make the case. Roy PS How could you conclude that I had said that suffering should not be abolished? I said no such thing. I said that people take suffering as something to be abolished. Suffering can be minimized but is a part of life. How we minimize and to what extent reveals who we are. Roy

The problem in responsibility is more in the evaluation than in the simple recounting of the facts of your participation. It is the meaning of your participation where the crux of your responsibility lies. To condemn all religious mythology in one sentence is a little broad. What I have learned from Nietzsche, Jung, and Joseph Campbell would preclude making such statement. Robert Graves' interpretation of myths as historic political iconography also precludes seeing mythology in that vein. In fact, one of the sickest shifts in world culture came about as a result of Socrates' losing faith in any legitimate meaning for the tragic world view. As a result, we have had 2,000 years of idealism-fascism in the name of progress conducted by the "philosopher princes" of the moment. Some progress has been real, but which has also raised the demand on the perfectability of the world as everyone embraced the Platonic notion of an ideal form (for society) which is realisable once the correction is introduced as in Christianity or Marxism. Socrates is no match in terms of intellect and understanding, interestingly enough, for Diotima, the woman seer Socrates quotes. Her understanding of love is a marriage of mythology and rational thought and is easily the most insightful view of love in The Symposium. Have many of you read Plato's Symposium? Speaking of myth again, in the US, as an example, unable to "bear our crosses", we go about as madmen with social promotion in schools and affirmative action to right wrongs with other wrongs. As Nietzsche said, "Suffering itself is taken as something to be abolished." If you think the conscious mind understands and creates all, we ought to discuss the meaning of a myth, such as "How Odin Lost His Eye" to understand that meaning is not created by the conscious mind but can be perceived by it. The conscious mind creates and has been created by a process deeper than itself. Roy

To say "men dream up religion" is to say that they are personally responsible for their dreams as well. Dream and myth have autonomous aspects with recurrent themes that of which ordinary people as dreamers and artists/creative intellects are all too often completely unaware. Admitting that dreams may be meaningful means that the unconscious is more than a place of forgetfullness. This can come as a blow to prideful ego-bound thinkers. I have the feeling that very few of you at this forum have put any time in studying the great professor of comparative religions, Joseph Cambpell. Einstein once said something like, "If you want your child to be intelligent, teach them mythology. If you want your child to be more intelligent, teach them even more mythology." His point is that there is a relation to the creative and intellectual process which is in essence a refined form of animism and mythological thinking. Cut yourself off from that at your own peril and create an illusion of your own seperateness from nature and evolution. Roy

I use objective in its original sense- being beyond mere perspective- objective as in some verifiable law, such as Euclidian, Newtonian, or otherwise. Stop being a den mother. And this is the second time you have chosen to make a personal response rather than actually arguing your point. In any case, make your case that governments elected by people have no right or obligation to take care of the economic system. The Romans invented the concept of res pubblica, and the government has the right and obligation to take care of the infrastructure of the community. Money's value is an agreement and comes out of the community as surely as a highway, a canal, or an army for the national defense. Further why have rules against slavery for example if every value is purely economic? Roy

In fact no one practices Keynesian economics completely. Few governments raise taxes as the economies begin to grow. For Keynes, this is the way to keep the economy from topping out at too high a point, and allows the government to get their money back to refinance the deficits that the government will run to keep the economy from getting too deeply into a recession. What does "laissez-faire" mean in the context of the fact that the government controls the money supply? When the government influences the economy through its enormous powers to tax and spend? Monetary and fiscal policy are political decisions. What would an objectively run economy be for the posters here and how would it be judged morally and rationally? Roy

My first post. A closed system with either an infinity of time or an infinity of space is not really a closed system. The universe is immortal or reconstitutes itself after dying. Therefore the entropy of the universe is reversed. If not, then we inhabit the middle of that strange string of existence that began in nothing and ends in nothing. Only then, nothing is different than any normal conception of nothing which can only produce nothing. Roy