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A Clarification
"And what they're running scared of is the truth."
That was a glib formulation. Or else shorthand. Because "What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer". None of us knows what the truth is. And if it came down the pike today we wouldn't recognise it.
Perhaps I should have written not "the truth" but "the quest for truth" or something like that. What fanatics of either or any party are turning their backs on is the need for painful thought, research and the sort of debate that actually listens to the opposition. I can understand why they get into that sclerotic condition; it's horrible to be in a state of doubt. But being in a state of doubt is the human condition.
The scientific method, the philosophical method- I think one might add the theological method- is to take a proposition and test it and test it and test it to destruction. If it survives all one's best assaults it acquires the status of a provisional truth.
This is how humankind inches forward. How it becomes better informed, wiser, more moral. The person who insists his "truth" is inviolable is standing in the way of this process.
Faith isn't knowledge, nor is scientific fact ever anything more than a working hypothesis. We know what we know, but we don't know what we don't know. At any time a new truth- one of Dick Cheyney's "unknown unknowns"- could cross the boundary and knock all our certainties skew-whiff.
That was a glib formulation. Or else shorthand. Because "What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer". None of us knows what the truth is. And if it came down the pike today we wouldn't recognise it.
Perhaps I should have written not "the truth" but "the quest for truth" or something like that. What fanatics of either or any party are turning their backs on is the need for painful thought, research and the sort of debate that actually listens to the opposition. I can understand why they get into that sclerotic condition; it's horrible to be in a state of doubt. But being in a state of doubt is the human condition.
The scientific method, the philosophical method- I think one might add the theological method- is to take a proposition and test it and test it and test it to destruction. If it survives all one's best assaults it acquires the status of a provisional truth.
This is how humankind inches forward. How it becomes better informed, wiser, more moral. The person who insists his "truth" is inviolable is standing in the way of this process.
Faith isn't knowledge, nor is scientific fact ever anything more than a working hypothesis. We know what we know, but we don't know what we don't know. At any time a new truth- one of Dick Cheyney's "unknown unknowns"- could cross the boundary and knock all our certainties skew-whiff.
no subject
Being a medium means you can say anything as an axiom: you've been there and seen it for yourself.
Actually, I like the tension of not knowing, of seeing through the glass darkly, but now, having been through the trauma and gift of watching someone die, I have the increased tension of hoping there will be a face-to-face, the Other Side, and God.
The only thing I'm certain about is that, Sylvia Brown included, no one knows anything here with certainty. The Other Side is at best seen as metaphor by us three-dimension beings.
Michael Crichton in his autobiography Travels talked about going to various psychics as a test, and he said the best ones, the real talents, seemed to see their glimpses as dream pictures--for example, one woman saw a "basket of snakes" surrounding him and said with some horror, "What DO you do for a living?" not understanding that part of his job lately had been daily editing of films, which including dumping parts of film reels into the trash...
We're not going to get a clear look at anything from here, so it's all guess work.
Except for science, and why are we so sure that that science and religion don't mix--finding out about DNA, the blueprint of us, for example--doesn't that make us more meaningful, and less random?
no subject
But perhaps she's trying to tell us something that corresponds to a truth- only it doesn't really work because our language isn't up to it- and it comes out sounding all funny-peculiar.
I have never understood why science and religion can't be friends. They're asking different sorts of questions. And I suspect they utilise different parts of our brains.