Oh Yeah?
Reality is a variable which depends on who is spinning the tale.
It saddens me to hear people get on their high- horses and use invalid trump cards without ever really thinking things through from the beginning.
There are the religious people who throw the trump card, “The Bible, Koran, Confucius, Torah, Budda…Says…” and that is supposed to end any further discussion.
There are the materialists that keep throwing Science up as their trump card without ever examining their thought processes either. That is even more distressing. They claim the scientific method trumps just Faith. Yet they have faith in things which are just as much of a story as Venus rising from the waves.
We have dogma. According to Wikipedia, “Dogma is a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. It serves as part of the primary basis of an ideology, nationalism or belief system, and it cannot be changed or discarded without affecting the very system’s paradigm, or the ideology itself.”
The fight between the dogmas is just like the dogs above with the stick. “Its mine…no its mine.” The basis behind almost every war.
The materialists say things like…”I can’t see God, so it doesn’t exist.” (Well, that seems silly…since we have microwaves, music and all sorts of smells that can’t be seen either.) That does not mean it doesn’t exist. It only means we are infants in this universe and do not have enough ways of discerning something. You can never prove something does NOT exist.
…But I love this! This is where I bring in Gravity! Still materialists will say, I can SEE gravity work so that is real.
What is Gravity? I will let you Google that, because the closest thing that science can say is it pulls matter together. Gravity is undefinable, just observable.
Notice that the religious people use the exact same method of validation in their definition for God: “See the universe and all it’s amazing intricate complexities? This is an observable mathematical wonder that proves he/she/it exists. A painting can only exist if there is a painter.
So what materialists have done is given the word gravity to an observable unknowing interaction. That is when I say, lets switch words. Lets give gravity a new name…lets call it God.
Now we have a construct, both unknowable, both do things that are observable but not definable, why is either name wrong? They are both just words for something we know little about. Calling it gravity, instead of calling it God does not clarify a thing! It is a dogma that we fall down on when we don’t know what we are talking about. One unknown, undefinable or the other still gets us no where. Everything is an infants story of how the universe works.
Yes, science can take the few tinker toys we have and build a toy house, but never seem to be able to give the construct a complete enough infrastructure to make it work!
The cover of Scientific America May 2014 throws out an often repeated story to the gurus of the religion called science. It says: “A Crisis in Physics?” The article talks about the belief that was going to pull everything together appears to have died. In other words, just like the dozen or so other times that brilliant minds have come up short, they are almost faced with the confession that what they declared as fact is indeed fiction.
That is the good part of science, at least at some point they may admit they are wrong, but it takes hell-in-a-hand-basket to get that.
As a philosopher that constantly examines reality, I see no point in arguing what is true, only what is perceived. Since every perception is relative any expressed perception or experience honestly conveyed has validity.
We don’t need more wars. We don’t need more dogma. We need to listen. We need the freedom to explore. We need to share without trump cards.
Wouldn’t that be a wonderful journey to enjoy?
Hugs, Pam