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TRUTH: An abstraction...... Our views are rationalizations influenced by personal values and experiences, opinions based on conceptualized facts subject to interpretation. To quote Erich Fromm (THE REVOLUTION OF HOPE), "The immediate fact is what it is, partly by reason of the thought involved in it." Someone once suggested that pure reason can best be accomplished when we believe in nothing and doubt everything---therefore we would not be prejudiced by popular ideas and see the reality behind the illusions. I have a view, that is based on the dialectics of an interconnected world which is ever changing and where developments spring from universal conflict and contradiction between the old and the new, not least of which are class struggles, which are born of these contradictions and antagonisms and all of those things which make each of us different from each other, like being Jewish in a Christian society, or a Black man in Hog Valley, Fl. Views continually evolve through personal experiences; the books, newspapers, magazines we read, people we have known, our environment and our culture, but that truth is subjective and abstract. If you say a surface is smooth and we look at it under a microscope, we see that it is course. When a dog looks at an elephant, it is large, but to a giraffe, it is small. The truth too often is based on preconceived ideas established by so-called norms which are not entirely virtuous. Hegel said there is a struggle of ideas. For every thesis there is an antithesis and reality develops out of contradiction and synthesis of those contradictions. The only truth is what we think because there are no absolutes. And the art of debate is not to provide truth, it is polemics; arguments arguing with arguments. Plato declared that as to what we are, we are beings "in search of meaning." And someone else said, "The truth will set you free." But whose truth? Every society is deceptively sanctimonious and distorts history by conditioning the minds of its citizens with falsifications to justify its existence and superiority. Sometimes patriots go along with this travesty, not unlike any religious cult. Let us never forget there are patriots on all sides who feel just as strongly about their positions. Unless we understand why they do we are doing our own side a grave injustice. We are not merely right because it makes us feel better and patriotism is never merely a side of things to cheer for as-if it were a sporting event. There were patriots on all sides during World Wars. They develop a faith, an unquestioned loyalty and a belief in their own manifest destiny and unreproachable virtue. Blind faith in anything is foolish, but one person's distortion may be another persons reality or perception of the truth. Children are taught they are right and everyone else is wrong. Napoleon said, "All history is a lie agreed upon." And a lie told enough times becomes believable. We must never give up our ability to reason and think for ourselves. We can be proud of our service to our country, our loyalty to our family, and pride in our heritage, but we can never ever just take things as they are without questioning the very essence of their truth. In my heritage, great Jewish minds never stopped questioning. Neither should we. We now have the technology to cause a nuclear winter and destroy the world. Our ecosystem is being destroyed by pollution. We make acid rain, toxic chemical dumps, nuclear radiation and develop methods to fight cancer while we go on producing more cancer. We have the technical skill to explore the universe but we lack the humanity to feed all the hungry people in the world. As I reflect on history and of man's inhumanity---the only plausible absolute truth is that as a civilization we have not yet demonstrated our ability or resolve to control our own destiny intelligently. The human race has been self-destructive and has yet to achieve anything even remotely resembling justice. If there is to be hope for any kind of decent future, or any future at all, there must be a movement comprising an ethos and a rationale that requires us to strive for a world based on humanitarian concerns where all life and all species are precious and it must be predicated on our collective wellbeing; all of us on this planet. And, we, each of us, can start that process in our own lives and from there it will extend out by example and by deed to the entire world. Hank Roth (g0lem)
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About Religion: Everyone wants to believe in something because it makes it easier to deal with reality even when it isn't true. Religion is a cultural meme good for groupishness and subservience but not much else. It may keep some people sane (or thinking they're sane) in an insane world. And you don't need it to be moral. In fact those with it often use it to excuse their immorality. Religion is an inate human need to rationalize the irrational. I believe as Einstein did....
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religius then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
"I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion."
"I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
"The idea of a person God is quite alien to me and seems even naive."
Albert Einstein
Above Greed: There is enough in the world for all human needs. There is NOT enough for human greed. If you never learn anything in this life, learn that. No one should have more than they NEED (not want) and not have more than they need until everyone on the planet has what they NEED. It is fundamentally wrong. It is immoral to take so much that others must suffer because they do not have even enough to sustain themselves. That is why we need socialism - "From each according to ability, to each according to need."
As much as I am compelled to admit that MOST fundamentalists are wacko, I must at the same time admit to my own fundamentalism. I am a Darwinian Fundamentalist. I am also a Socialist Fundamentalist and while I admired Marx, I admit to being a somewhat lapsed Marxist but nevertheless true to my conviction that socialism is morally superior but I am more convinced than ever that it is also largely a pipe dream and the reason for that is somewhat predicated on my Darwinian-ism and my E.O.Wilsonian view of behavior.
A Darwinian fundamentalist is one rejects the "traditional" upside down view of the universe that humans have believed in one fashion or another for thousands of years that everything of the mind, including meaning and purpose are from on high and the Darwinian fundamentalist accepts the rather recent Darwinian algorithms about natural selection and all that that has led us to with the recognition also that there are NO good compromise positions which salvage some of the traditional supernatural views.
The problem for the Darwinian rejectionists, those believers in creationist thinking is that evolution is cruel - but an intelligent designer is good and not cruel - and assume that it must be impossible for Darwinian agorthyms to cull out mutations and present us with such magnificant design. Only a designer could do that, they say. Darwiniansm might work but only if there is a designer behind the selection process.
Evolution is more clever than we are. Adaption is what is brilliant. The process has a rationale. The behaviorism of evolution can be explained easily in the selfish gene and if you treated the gene intellectually it appears the gene is intelligent as an adaptation machine.
There is logic and it is fitness - the best capable of surviving does. That is all. With a virus as a metaphor, a virus - and all living things (all molecules) promote their own replication (more than rivals promote theirs). It is as simple as that. That is what molecules do. That is what bacteria does. That is what animals do. And that is what we human animals do. We replicate and survive.
And that certainly doesn't mean we're smart about the protection of our biosphere or we do what is necessary for our long term survival. About that we can be pretty dumb....
