A report on the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14406818) suggests that there is a small but rising incidence of HIV sufferers being persuaded by Christian Pastors to give up their drug treatment and rely on prayer. Some people have died as a result.
As far as I can see, there is a very large and growing number of actual clinical cases where people have received drug treatment and been enabled to live many years and enjoy a reasonable quality of life too. But on the other hand there is not a single authenticated case of cure through prayer, and meanwhile those people who do not take the drugs to control HIV die of AIDS.
Therefore even if you believe, counter to the evidence, that prayer will be efficacious, stopping drug treatment is uninformed to say the least, stupid maybe. To deliberately convince someone to stop drug treatment and rely on prayer instead is not merely uninformed, it is playing with people's lives and indirectly hastening their death.
I suggested on Facebook that a Pastor who persuades one of his followers to take this course should be prosecuted. Well, I suppose that's a bit wild. As far as I know there is no law against talking someone into risking their life in that way. One of my friends suggested that even if there was no-one would be prosecuted because the Human Rights Act would defend their choice to live by their culture. I'm not so sure there is a Human Right to persuade someone to behave in such a way, but it is true that main-stream churches have gotten away with hiding and harbouring criminal child abusers, so one doubts that talking someone out of taking beneficial drugs would incur the law's wrath.
As so often is the case, my mind turned to John Stuart Mill, whose work “On Liberty” ought to be read much wider, and much more attentively, than it is. Mill thought that liberty, in thought, speech and action, was an essential condition for human growth; that no-one could reach their full potential without it. If your liberty is circumscribed, so is your growth. There ought only be, Mill thought, one check on liberty, and that was causing harm to others. The problem, of course, is that it all depends on how you understand causing harm. Does getting allowing your child to get hooked on smoking tobacco by not showing him the error of his ways and a good example? After all, the habit will, very likely, shorten his life. Or what about feeding one's child hard drugs? In that case the harm is even more certain. Or what if the person affected is not a child but an adult with the right and ability to make their own decisions on the subject?
Pastors are almost always persuasive speakers, and they have been vested with great authority. It seems to be the case that once someone has chosen to follow a particular pastor, they have in some sense handed over their decision-making capacities to him. He can then persuade and convince them into all sorts of courses of action, some benign or helpful and others potentially malignant and harmful, both to the individual and to society at large. So in the kind of cases quoted by the BBC, it seems to me that their actions, their use of words, falls well within the definition of causing harm, and not so far short of manslaughter.
I did wonder whether if we were starting again with the criminal code crime could be defined simply as causing harm to another, with a range of punishments according to the degree of harm caused – a black eye might attract a lesser penalty, and causing death, whether by crazy driving, pushing drugs, deliberate murder, or recklessly lethal advice from a position of power, a more severe one.
But we're not starting again, and people with high status will be enabled to get away with recklessly endangering others as they have been to date. What a shame.
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
Sunday, 29 May 2011
Missed Opportunity
My mother was a poetry expert. Actually she earned her living as a Speech Therapist and Elocution Teacher, but what she most enjoyed was working with her senior pupils to get them through the LAMDA and Poetry Society exams. Some of those who came to her went on to be distinguished in various aspects of the dramatic arts. She knew her Shakespeare inside out, and was very fond of Keats and Shelley among others.
Most of this passed me by. A steady drip of poetry, both good and less so, has a similar effect on a child as inoculation. I did learn to appreciate some poets and their work, but not as widely as I might have. And I never took the opportunity to discuss with her the basis of her interpretations. When she advised that a line be rendered this way rather than that, what exactly did she have in mind? Was it the sound, the dramatic effect, the poet's meaning? And if the latter, what did she know of the background against which he was writing?
I know a little about Shakespeare's place in history, not much, and nothing at all about Keats. But I do know quite a bit about Shelley. He married the daughter of one of my heroes, William Godwin, who went on herself to write Frankenstein. Shelley was deeply influenced by Godwin's 1793 book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and in some respects was more Godwinian in his views than Godwin had been when he wrote it. Shelley certainly disapproved of adjustments that Godwin made to his theory in later editions of the book in the light of experience. Shelley's poetry is intimately related to Godwin's original philosophy.
And so was his behaviour. Shelley's cavalier attitude towards other people's feelings and opinions, which sprung from his enthusiasm for Godwin's ideas, led indirectly to the suicide of Mary Wollstonecraft's first daughter, Fanny, and directly to the suicide of his first wife, Harriet, who he abandoned for Mary Godwin, and to his subsequent total disinterest in his children from that marriage.
Which is why I would like to have discussed my mother's interpretation of his poetry with her. How much of this did she know? How much of it, if she knew it, did she take into account when teaching his poetry? Did she think that the relationship between the poetic expression of ideas and the behaviour to which those ideas led was important, or even relevant?
I shall never know. Does it matter? Godwin's ideas also form the basis of his daughter Mary Shelley's brilliantly original novel, Frankenstein, and many of the conflicts and questions that arise from his teaching are worked out between the characters of the story. Indeed, it was to popularise her father's insights that Mary wrote the book. But who cares about that now? It's just a darn good story, isn't it?
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Scepticism
My main philosophical interest for the last 20 years or so has been epistemology, the study of what we can and cannot know, what the limitations on knowledge are. My natural inclination is to be sceptical of claims to knowledge. In my view there are good reasons for suspecting that our confidence in what we think we know is not well founded, and that the greater the confidence someone has in a position the more likely they are to be on very shaky ground.
Recently I have noticed that other fields of study are coming up with work that underwrites the sceptical position. For instance, a few years ago I read 3 books by the biologist Andrew Parker. The books are mainly about vision, and describe his work particularly in the evolution of colour vision. In these volumes he describes in great detail both the seeing end in different versions of the eye, and also the seen end and the physics of the different ways nature has evolved that give us colours to see. (I'm not really happy with the way I've phrased that, but it'll do.) This convinced me that the colours we see are created by the brain - they represent something out there, but we cannot be sure exactly what. Cannot, in the previous sentence, indicates a fundamental barrier to knowledge. Certainly colour does not exist in the accepted sense: it's a creation of our brains.
I have taken an intelligent interest in cosmology, as much as a non-physicist can. One thing we can be reasonably sure of is that there is a whole lot out there we do not understand. There are theoretical reasons for thinking that there must be dark matter, dark energy, but so far we are not able to detect either directly. Gravitational lensing of distant objects makes us think that there must be a massive something between us and it. But we cannot actually detect that something itself. Who knows what else there might be out there, and who knows how accurate our present understanding of the natural world is? But if we have good reasons for suspecting that we are ignorant of something in excess of 90% of what exists, how can we claim to have secure knowledge of the other 10%? All we can say is that what we think we know represents what is actually there well enough to produce effects we can repeat and describe, whether in my toaster, or by flying the Atlantic and sending space-craft to Saturn, or in the Collider at CERN. We can trust what we think we see well enough to support our evolution, but perhaps (necessarily) no better than that.
Then there is all the interesting work going on in Neuroscience and Psychology. There is experimental evidence that seems to show that limb movements which we take to be the result of conscious decisions are in fact initiated in the brain long (up to 6 seconds) before we become aware of them. Miles's TV series shows, among other things, how pre-conscious emotions determine what we take to be rational decisions. Work by psychologists with illusions is also convincing that a good chunk of perception is in the brain, not the sense organs. For example, the subject is shown a face saying either BAH or PAH. The lip movement is clear and distinct. He also hears the speaker's voice saying either BAH or PAH. But the sound played is always BAH. Even the researcher who described this, after 20 years of working on it, always hears what the mouth seems to say, despite the fact that he knows very well what sound is actually reaching the ears. It always works. For some reason the brain hears what the eye sees, not what comes in the ears. There is a lot of work along these lines showing similar things. In other words, our perceptions are, to a larger extent than we would want to think, constructed in our brains, and are not a reliable reflection of the world as it is.
Now the BBC has reported some work with painkillers described in Science Translational Medicine. In short, people acting as experimental subjects are hooked up to a system that delivers a powerful pain killer, and are also subjected to some pain. The experiment seems to show that the subjects' experience of pain is greater or less depending on what they are told is happening, and not on the pain given or the pain killer administered. The brain's expectation of pain can completely wipe out the effect of the pain killer, for example. It's well worth reading the item.
The point is, of course, that our experience of the external world and how it impinges on us is created in the brain, and is not directly connected to our experience itself. What we think is what we experience, not what happens to us.
The idea that we can be certain of anything outside our own heads appears more and more ridiculous.
Recently I have noticed that other fields of study are coming up with work that underwrites the sceptical position. For instance, a few years ago I read 3 books by the biologist Andrew Parker. The books are mainly about vision, and describe his work particularly in the evolution of colour vision. In these volumes he describes in great detail both the seeing end in different versions of the eye, and also the seen end and the physics of the different ways nature has evolved that give us colours to see. (I'm not really happy with the way I've phrased that, but it'll do.) This convinced me that the colours we see are created by the brain - they represent something out there, but we cannot be sure exactly what. Cannot, in the previous sentence, indicates a fundamental barrier to knowledge. Certainly colour does not exist in the accepted sense: it's a creation of our brains.
I have taken an intelligent interest in cosmology, as much as a non-physicist can. One thing we can be reasonably sure of is that there is a whole lot out there we do not understand. There are theoretical reasons for thinking that there must be dark matter, dark energy, but so far we are not able to detect either directly. Gravitational lensing of distant objects makes us think that there must be a massive something between us and it. But we cannot actually detect that something itself. Who knows what else there might be out there, and who knows how accurate our present understanding of the natural world is? But if we have good reasons for suspecting that we are ignorant of something in excess of 90% of what exists, how can we claim to have secure knowledge of the other 10%? All we can say is that what we think we know represents what is actually there well enough to produce effects we can repeat and describe, whether in my toaster, or by flying the Atlantic and sending space-craft to Saturn, or in the Collider at CERN. We can trust what we think we see well enough to support our evolution, but perhaps (necessarily) no better than that.
Then there is all the interesting work going on in Neuroscience and Psychology. There is experimental evidence that seems to show that limb movements which we take to be the result of conscious decisions are in fact initiated in the brain long (up to 6 seconds) before we become aware of them. Miles's TV series shows, among other things, how pre-conscious emotions determine what we take to be rational decisions. Work by psychologists with illusions is also convincing that a good chunk of perception is in the brain, not the sense organs. For example, the subject is shown a face saying either BAH or PAH. The lip movement is clear and distinct. He also hears the speaker's voice saying either BAH or PAH. But the sound played is always BAH. Even the researcher who described this, after 20 years of working on it, always hears what the mouth seems to say, despite the fact that he knows very well what sound is actually reaching the ears. It always works. For some reason the brain hears what the eye sees, not what comes in the ears. There is a lot of work along these lines showing similar things. In other words, our perceptions are, to a larger extent than we would want to think, constructed in our brains, and are not a reliable reflection of the world as it is.
Now the BBC has reported some work with painkillers described in Science Translational Medicine. In short, people acting as experimental subjects are hooked up to a system that delivers a powerful pain killer, and are also subjected to some pain. The experiment seems to show that the subjects' experience of pain is greater or less depending on what they are told is happening, and not on the pain given or the pain killer administered. The brain's expectation of pain can completely wipe out the effect of the pain killer, for example. It's well worth reading the item.
The point is, of course, that our experience of the external world and how it impinges on us is created in the brain, and is not directly connected to our experience itself. What we think is what we experience, not what happens to us.
The idea that we can be certain of anything outside our own heads appears more and more ridiculous.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Why I am a Humanist
I found two comments on the British Humanist Association forum which I felt I had to respond to.
1) We all only live once. Only humanism tells you this, which is why everybody in the world should be humanist.
I have a problem with this: it's a rather dogmatic approach. It isn't that I believe I only live once because that's what Humanism tells me. That approach is far too like a religion, and illustrates why some atheists I have met are so ready to denigrate Humanism as just another belief system.
It's actually the other way round. All the evidence I have seen about who were are, what we are, how our consciousness happens, how much our personality depends on what's going on in the electrical circuits and pharmacology of our brain, it seems inescapable that when our brain stops, we stop. There doesn't seem to be any magic stuff floating around somewhere inside us that is not dependent on our brain. So it's clear to me that any kind of survival after death is so much wishful thinking. We cannot imagine not existing, so we assume that somehow we will continue in some other world which, were it not for that wishful thinking, there would be no reason to think exists.
That much is clear to me. And because it is clear to me, then one of the reasons I am a Humanist is that this view is the Humanist view too.
2) This means that humanism must be only about improving the quality of life of all people on this planet, whether they are humanist or not.
Another problem: I cannot see any logical reason why only having one life means that we must be about improving the quality of life for all people. It is just as rational to say that, for the same reason, I am determined to get the maximum pleasure for myself in any way that appeals to me, and everyone else can go whistle a happy tune.
It so happens that my temperament is to be an ethical person. That's where it starts. I then work out my ethical response to the problems that life throws at me - how best I can live, which for me involves maximising the common good. I think it is probably true that if we all acted that way life would be better, more enjoyable, than if I was a blinkered hedonist, but I can't be sure. However, it's good enough for me and that's the way I live.
So another reason I am a Humanist is because I notice that this is the way Humanism presents itself to the world.
1) We all only live once. Only humanism tells you this, which is why everybody in the world should be humanist.
I have a problem with this: it's a rather dogmatic approach. It isn't that I believe I only live once because that's what Humanism tells me. That approach is far too like a religion, and illustrates why some atheists I have met are so ready to denigrate Humanism as just another belief system.
It's actually the other way round. All the evidence I have seen about who were are, what we are, how our consciousness happens, how much our personality depends on what's going on in the electrical circuits and pharmacology of our brain, it seems inescapable that when our brain stops, we stop. There doesn't seem to be any magic stuff floating around somewhere inside us that is not dependent on our brain. So it's clear to me that any kind of survival after death is so much wishful thinking. We cannot imagine not existing, so we assume that somehow we will continue in some other world which, were it not for that wishful thinking, there would be no reason to think exists.
That much is clear to me. And because it is clear to me, then one of the reasons I am a Humanist is that this view is the Humanist view too.
2) This means that humanism must be only about improving the quality of life of all people on this planet, whether they are humanist or not.
Another problem: I cannot see any logical reason why only having one life means that we must be about improving the quality of life for all people. It is just as rational to say that, for the same reason, I am determined to get the maximum pleasure for myself in any way that appeals to me, and everyone else can go whistle a happy tune.
It so happens that my temperament is to be an ethical person. That's where it starts. I then work out my ethical response to the problems that life throws at me - how best I can live, which for me involves maximising the common good. I think it is probably true that if we all acted that way life would be better, more enjoyable, than if I was a blinkered hedonist, but I can't be sure. However, it's good enough for me and that's the way I live.
So another reason I am a Humanist is because I notice that this is the way Humanism presents itself to the world.
Saturday, 7 November 2009
A little thinking...
Sometimes we talk about things where we have a high degree of confidence and also where there is also a good amount of justification for that confidence in the form of supporting evidence.
Sometimes the evidence for is not that great but there are convincing reasons for thinking that the opposite of something we think we know is false. There are examples where this can be critical. Approaching a distant traffic signal in uncertain light conditions we might say that we are not sure if it is red or yellow but we are sure that it is not green, and act on that, which may save our lives. Or we may say that from scientific observation it is certain that the Earth goes round the Sun, where our first impression is the opposite. It is normal to talk in terms of knowledge about things like that. Sceptics like me might have theoretical issues with such statements, but it is normally fine to base actions on them. So we can develop medicines on the basis of our knowledge of biology and chemistry, even if I am not totally certain that we really know what we think we know. And when I am sick I am perfectly happy to rely on them. This kind of knowledge is good enough for ordinary life.
Included in this area are things like mathematics and the results of scientific enquiry. Confidence is both high and justified. There are good reasons for believing things like this. Without many of them modern life would not be possible – no engineering, no medicine, no cars or planes or trains, no satellite navigation, no radio or TV, vastly less agriculture, no computers, no credit cards, and so on and on and on. No-one fights wars over this kind of knowledge. There may be theoretical doubts like mine, but these are the things that we believe we know, and the results are before your eyes.
On the other hand are the things in which we have confidence but without any justification. I remember having a discussion some years ago with a man and his wife about the limitations of knowledge – a topic he plainly had a poor grasp of as you will see. The example he used was his certainty of is wife's fidelity. She growled at him: “Don't you be so sure!” My opinion at the time was that she objected to being taken for granted, something he was in the habit of doing, and I still think that's right. But until the advent of DNA testing, it has always been an issue because men did not have any way to be certain of the paternity of the children they were expending effort to bring up, apart from incarcerating their wives. Evidence of the defensiveness of men in this respect is all around us. That's what Harems are about, and you can easily develop the idea.
On a different level I was chatting to someone I had met when walking our dogs. Somehow the conversation got round to how things look from a dog's point of view, and I mentioned that they are colour blind. “Oh I don't believe that!” she said and went on with an anecdote that I did not commit to memory. The point is (and I did not bore her with it) that dogs' eyes do not have receptors (like ours do) that are capable of distinguishing light of different wavelengths, which is how colour vision starts. Of course we can't be absolutely certain of what a dog's brain does with the information that it does receive, but as it does not get information about variations in light wavelengths, colour vision has all the marks of being impossible. But the person I was talking to had her own opinion, in total ignorance of the science, and that was that. She believed, with conviction, her dog saw colour not merely without evidence, but flying in the face of evidence.
Beliefs of this kind can be incredibly strong, and very important to people. I knew someone who was absolutely convinced that she talked every day with her dead mother. Many people find great comfort in thoughts like that. They are convinced. It is remotely possible, we cannot be absolutely certain that people do not survive death in some way, even if it looks like a very remote possibility from a scientific point of view. But there is certainly no evidence that they do. People who are convinced that they can talk to dead loved ones are basing that certainty on something private to them, something going on in their own head that cannot be substantiated. However comforting or important such beliefs are, they remain beliefs, not knowledge. However, they are things about which we are found saying “I know” when we mean “I believe”.
There is a great deal of confusion in the area that encompasses belief and knowledge. Just the other day, in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, I was hanging on to a group that was getting information from someone at the front who was obviously very knowledgeable. It turns out that he was an anthropologist on the museum staff and they were a class of students. He was standing before a display of fossil hominid skulls explaining the relationships and where and how discoveries made since the display was built 3 years ago fit in. He was talking about the time, just over 30,000 years ago, relatively recently in geological terms, when there were 3 species of human alive on the planet. There was us, Homo sapiens, there were the Neaderthals, Homo neanderthalis, and the small human species whose fossils were discovered a few years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores, Homo floresiensis. He went on quickly to wave his hand over the display and show other times when there were “several human species alive at the same time”.
This last phrase was too much for one of the students, who interjected “Don't you mean human-like?”. He replied, I thought with a touch of irritation, “No, they are humans, genus Homo.”
At this point my imagination went into overdrive, and I quickly formed an opinion for which I have no evidence whatsoever. My speculation was that this young lady was having a problem, one that the lecturer had encountered before, perhaps often before. Her problem was, I guessed, that her religious beliefs told her that God created man in his own image, and that we are not related to the other species, and definitely not to the apes. But the anthropological evidence before her eyes, of which there is a mountain, is to the contrary. The relationships between human species and pre-human close relatives have long been studied. Controversies about exact details of relationships exist, but the framework is as certain as things get in science. There is no debate that we and the other apes share a common ancestor, and there have been other species of our own genus, Homo, to whom we are more or less closely related. If I am right, (and I emphasise that this is entirely conjecture on my part) the young lady does indeed have a serious problem because religious convictions are among the firmest we have. They are the beliefs of which we are, often, the most certain, our strongest convictions. But they remain beliefs, not knowledge, and often fly in the face of knowledge in the other sense.
Jung said that he “knew” about the existence of God – but he had no evidence. He knew what a lot of ancient people believed, he had evidence for that. He knew what his patients believed, he had evidence for that too. And he knew what he believed, but that does not add up to knowledge of the divine, only a lot of different beliefs. None the less, he said, and we say, “I know” with conviction and certainty.
It is, I hope, obvious that there is every reason to doubt, to be very wary, when we have beliefs, strong convictions, without justification. These are the sort of “knowledge” that throughout history people have been prepared to kill for, and on behalf of which they have been prepared to torture people, to burn them alive. Wars have been fought and terrible crimes committed because of these beliefs. In human history atrocities have been committed by people with a certain belief against people who differed from them by tiny amounts. No wars have been fought over the certainties of mathematics. But on the other hand mathematicians have been burned at the stake by religious believers whose beliefs could not stand being confronted by knowledge.
On a smaller scale, our preparedness to defend our beliefs, even on such a trivial thing as a dog's colour vision, can lead to people falling out in a big way. People resort to violence to defend unjustified belief, either against other beliefs or against the inroads made by knowledge.
For this reason it is vitally important that on the one hand we know what we believe, and on the other, believe what we know.
*I am grateful to Andre Comte-Sponville (see readinglist below) for the idea contained in his phrase "know what we believe and believe what we know".
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
Danger, contains philosophy!
As a hint to anyone considering entering the sweepstake, or who would like to make another entry, so far Bonnie has taken 40 pics of the crown of the Chrysler Building, all from the hotel window, and it was only 7 am this morning when I counted.
One of the joys of being anywhere with a local is that you get to see things and go places you never would otherwise. Last night we went for a meal with Rick, and ate in a local diner that most tourists would pass buy. Quite apart from a nice family natter (something I know Bonnie misses and that I too feel deprived of) I had one of the most tasty meatloaf and mash with veggies that I could have wanted. And after came the treat of the trip so far. As we left the diner, ahead of us was a floodlit pinnacle and Bonnie asked what it was. I replied "Grand Central Station" and Rick said, "No, it's the other way". "Yes it is!" the foreign tourist said with glee - "who lives here?" And we all had a good giggle. "That's going in the blog." Bonnie contributed, showing that she has got to know me over the years.
Back in the hotel Bonnie took some pictures of the lobby. The lillies are real. It has a feeling of 1920s grandeur about it. It's worth checking out the web site if you haven't already.
Of course I woke about 2 a.m. which would have been about time to take the dog out back home. But I dropped off again quickly enough with the help of one of the books from my reading list below. If nothing else it caused me to change my email signature.
I did lie in bed in the dark for a few moments considering why it is that so many people respond badly to criticism. One of the reasons I got into Karl Popper was that I read in one of his essays some things I had been thinking for quite a while on that very topic. It seems to me that it is only through criticism that we find out how our position differs from someone else's. It's how we discover their view of the world, and by posing a question about the validity of what we have offered, makes us think again. So at the very least we learn something, and maybe discover something we did not know before. It's the most valuable thing.
Back in the 1970s in college Cecelia Goodenough made a lot of the need to question what we had accepted because at the very least we got to know it better, and hopefully would get a better, stronger, understanding. Her subject was Christian Doctrine, which she understood as a journey into truth, so every question had to be asked. Not all of our group were willing to follow her, and to test their convictions, which is too often the case with people who have religious beliefs, but for those who did, all gained. She would not have agreed with where my questioning took me, but she would have supported my method.
"Saper aude" said Kant, dare to know, dare to use your intelligence, dare to distinguish the possibly true from the certainly false.
One of the joys of being anywhere with a local is that you get to see things and go places you never would otherwise. Last night we went for a meal with Rick, and ate in a local diner that most tourists would pass buy. Quite apart from a nice family natter (something I know Bonnie misses and that I too feel deprived of) I had one of the most tasty meatloaf and mash with veggies that I could have wanted. And after came the treat of the trip so far. As we left the diner, ahead of us was a floodlit pinnacle and Bonnie asked what it was. I replied "Grand Central Station" and Rick said, "No, it's the other way". "Yes it is!" the foreign tourist said with glee - "who lives here?" And we all had a good giggle. "That's going in the blog." Bonnie contributed, showing that she has got to know me over the years.
Of course I woke about 2 a.m. which would have been about time to take the dog out back home. But I dropped off again quickly enough with the help of one of the books from my reading list below. If nothing else it caused me to change my email signature.
I did lie in bed in the dark for a few moments considering why it is that so many people respond badly to criticism. One of the reasons I got into Karl Popper was that I read in one of his essays some things I had been thinking for quite a while on that very topic. It seems to me that it is only through criticism that we find out how our position differs from someone else's. It's how we discover their view of the world, and by posing a question about the validity of what we have offered, makes us think again. So at the very least we learn something, and maybe discover something we did not know before. It's the most valuable thing.
Back in the 1970s in college Cecelia Goodenough made a lot of the need to question what we had accepted because at the very least we got to know it better, and hopefully would get a better, stronger, understanding. Her subject was Christian Doctrine, which she understood as a journey into truth, so every question had to be asked. Not all of our group were willing to follow her, and to test their convictions, which is too often the case with people who have religious beliefs, but for those who did, all gained. She would not have agreed with where my questioning took me, but she would have supported my method.
"Saper aude" said Kant, dare to know, dare to use your intelligence, dare to distinguish the possibly true from the certainly false.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)