John M.
An interesting concept: "reversed thinking". Is that a version
of what in art is called "positive space/negative space"? MC Escher made full
use of that relationship and explored the range of what one can do by playing
with it. Religion lives in that relationship (of positive space/negative space
that is "reversed thinking")... but how one defines positive and negative... ah,
there's the rub! I tend to like the Buddhist approach of "inner enlightenment"
where all the work is inside each individual's own mind... yet I've heard that
Buddhist sects have massacred one another time and again down through the ages,
over the history of the religion.
Incidentally, your statement that Christian fundamentalists aren't
likely to do more than "turn away and write you off"... what about the
Inquisition?
What I don't get is the fear that some "very religious" people seem
to feel over any attempt by any science to "prove there is no God"... If
one really believes their vision of what God represents, then it seems to me,
one should have faith that nothing can happen that their God doesn't want/plan
for/arrange/require/and etc. To try to 'save God from Science" is to demonstrate
a certain lack of faith, in my view.
Judith
PS: Here's an Escher work, called "Devils and Angels", which
illustrates all of the concepts I've just described...
----- Original Message -----From: John MTo: ***Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2004 5:08 PMSubject: Re: [ROSEN] Rosen and William PaleyJudith, you wrote in paretheses:(he told me he was very religious and had no interest in any science that tried to prove there is no God).I believe it is the reversed thinking. I know of no science that would prove that there IS a God. It is always 3rd person opinion or based on stories 'felt', 'dreamed', or anyway halucinated without a possibility of reproducing even the circumstances for such memories, or producing logically binding exclusive conclusions of such (discounting the "there may be no other explanation", which, over the millennia proved false in many cases).They "know" - emotionally, and this is the end of an argument.The hardest opponents in such matters are orthodox Jewish people (they curse) and fundamentalist Muslims (they kill). Christian fundamentalists simply turn away and write you off.I never had a chance to discuss such things with Buddhists. Hindus,however, accept your opinion with a smile ("your foolishness", it's OK) and take another flower-sacrifice to the birth-cave of Ganges.I arrived (mostly) at the Hindu attitude lately, without the flowers.CheersJohn MPS I derived a 'narrative' (contrasting the cosmologist narrative of the Big Bang) for an initiation of our world followable to our human logic. As I later thought: it is anticipatory, what I called deterministic (with a fitting definition of the term), which does not allow a supernatural creator, without the possibility of multiple parallel systems. Now there is such a possibility in the Multiverse idea, not the Everett-etc. - Tegmar versions, with 'similar' variants, but in my narrative, coming innumerable ones from the "Plenitude" - any of them can be totally different. I did not specify any details for the Plenitude, (except that it is infinite in varieties and interchanges, an invariant symmetry in infinite repetitions, - but its origin may be involving a God if someone insists. I CAN leave it unspecified: It is beyond our science, it is even beyond our speculation. - JMSNIP