Clearly, we'd be better off believing in geocentric theory.

Noel

Is any thing more fundamental than a person�s set of presuppositions and assumptions about the basic make up of the universe?

His character? His actions?

It is typical of people who spend their lives pondering the universe to make a person's worldview his defining characteristic and marker of worth. Ask a professional businessman the same question, and he will say it is a person's portfolio. Ask a dentist and he will say it is a person's dental profile.

If Hell exists, it is well populated with men of exemplary worldviews.

Is "just" really the word you were looking for in your last paragraph?

Rational, perhaps. Understandable even. But "just" is certainly not the word I would apply.

sammler:

Yes, just.

Robert:

Character and actions are a function of worldview. It was because Hitler was a Darwinist and a Galilean that the Holocaust occurred.

Noel:

We do.

OJ
Nonsense. More likely that worldviews are a function of character and actions. For a supposed anti-intellectual, you give too much credit to the intellectual arts.

People develop worldviews to satisfy their intellectual curiosity and to make sense of the world as they experience it. Worldviews generally justify moral and ethical positions already committed to, and reinforce existing values and prejudices.

Are you playing a semantic bait and switch with me, Orrin? Or do you really believe the Sun revolves around the Earth?

Noel Erinjeri

Noel:

Revolutions are meaningless--Earth is the center of the Universe. That's what Galileo denied--the sun bit was accepted.

Robert:

Galileism and Darwinism are intellectualisms.

The earth is the center of the material universe, for it is from here that man looks out upon the rest.

If one's faith depends upon which of this or that star or planet revolves around another, it is that faith which a puny thing.

Lou:

Precisely.

OJ,
Yes, but neither one has any effect on a person's character.

Orrin,

I see you've gone with "semantic bait and switch."
In any case, he wasn't persecuted for advocating the heliocentric theory but rather for denying the possibility he could be wrong.

Noel Erinjeri

Noel:

No, for arguing that it mattered.

Robert:

It is one's character.

Lou:

One need not be in the center to look at the rest.

To maintain such makes each person the center of the universe, which is precisely the crime of which OJ, without a hint of irony, accuses areligionists.

OJ,
You obviously have little regard for character if you would equate it with worldview. Think of the translator character from "Saving Private Ryan". His worldview was full of the glory of battle, his character shrunk from it.

Yes, our characters don't matter much so long as we have our worldview straight--that's the point of the Fall.

Jeff:

Yes, you aren't the center of the universe, we all are.

OJ, I couldn't write a more succinct and damaging indictment of intellectual hubris than what you just wrote. Damn character and morality, the idea is the thing, the whole thing, the only thing.

You are the first person I have ever known of whom it can be said lives in an Ivory basement.

Character and morality follow from the idea. What you call good character is conformity to the Judeo-Christian ideal rather than to rationalist ideas.

What happens when they don't follow? We all know of people with wonderful worldviews and crummy characters. Likewise we know of people of admirable character who have nothing but the fuzziest worldview. Thinking often is a poor substitute for doing the right thing. Too much thinking can be very damaging to the character. It takes very advanced thought to contradict common sense.

Of course you're just following in the footsteps of your intellectual father, Plato. Only the philosopher has what it takes to be king.

I don't know, OJ could be on to something.

If someone thinks that the Earth is the centre of the universe and everything revolves around it, that helps me form an opinion about them.

That, plus taste in music. And foam around the lips.

They follow.

Brit:

Exactly my point. The belief that man is an insignificant species on an insignificant planet produces predictable results.

Galileo was not Nietzsche. Nor was he Immanuel Kant.

That said, Lou is correct.

But the problem for Galileo (and for Copernicus, and Kepler) was that there was no way to appreciate (or interpret) what they saw and wrote without a challenge to the Church, even though Ptolemy was a pagan Greek.

So the persecution was not 'just', which is why John Paul II addressed the matter a few years ago.

Unfortunately, OJ, a great deal of Judeo-Christian ethics are the result of rationalist ideas.

We have, rationally, taken on board there is not, nor has there ever been, witches.

We have, rationally, taken on board that "each from their own kind" is nonsense, and that Africans, say, are just as human as Europeans.

We have, rationally, taken on board that women are worth just as much as men, no matter what the Bible says.

And we have, rationally, taken on board that loaning money with interest is not such a prohibited thing after all.

Etc.

No, they aren't.

There were and are witches. We don't treat them as roughly as their beliefs warrant anymore. But there are plenty of other forms of asocial behavior we're far harsher towards--drug use for instance. You always seem to get confused by this one just because witchcraft doesn't work. It's kind of like saying Alger Hiss shouldn't have been punished because communism didn't work.

Rationally Africans are a different species. It's the denial of reason that makes us treat them as the same and it's a credit to you Darwinists that you renounce your own theory rather than follow where reason has led your blood-drenched past.

Reason demonstrates the difference between men and women to be not just the obvious but far deeper physiologically, neurologically, etc.

We have usury laws even though they are irrational because we retain Judeo-Christian values.

Etc.

jim:

No, Galileanism results in Nietzsche though.

OJ:

Have you read The Witches Hammer?

It clearly describes what witches are, and what they are able to do, and why, therefore, they deserve execution.

Wrong on all counts, unfortunately.

Your assertion that Africans are a different species is complete nonsense. That they are a different kind is a conclusion one could only reach by reading the Bible -- NB, there are several Christian sects who condemn misceganation on just the grounds I cited.

Reason demonstrates there are profound differences between men and women. It takes religion to provide an imprimatur for institutionalized hatred of women.

And we know bats not to be birds.

And we don't use 3 as the value for pi.

Etc.

Jeff:

The witches didn't know that any more than the communists did.

You think two finches are different species but are forced to deny it among humans or be linked to the Applied Darwinism of last century. Speaks well of you, badly of your theory.

Recognizing that the genders are better suited to complimentary roles isn't hatred. Forcing them into unnatural ones is. It's why working women are so unhappy.

Yet Pi is constant and infinite...