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• Tuesday, June 24, 2008 01:58 PM

  @lynx, then I'll shut up ;-)

  Two last points: I do not equate the philosophy of atheism with religion directly. I DO equate the tactics and the language of the militant atheist with that of the fundamentalist religious devotee. Zealotry is zealotry under any guise, and while the philosophy of atheism is obviously more evolved than that of traditional religions (of any stripe), it is no less subject to codification and dogmatization.

  I made a distinction also between surpassing and dismissing. Obviously, valid observation is valid by definition. Newton's laws were originally thought to govern all matter--and at the time they did; all KNOWN matter worked within Newtonian physics. Newton was surpassed in the quantum age when it became evident that those laws ceased to function at the quantum level. Quantum mechanics did not negate Newton's laws in the manifest world in which he elaborated them, but the discovery of relativity and the quantum field required dismissing those laws in the very macro and micro manifest world. The broader the viewpoint (i.e. the more experience we have relative to what we're observing, the more we can observe and the more we experience, ad infinitum) the more accurate we can be in our explanation.

  You seem to me to speak of atheism as an absolute, and I am merely suggesting that it is more rightly open-ended and evolving in the same way that the whole of the Cosmos is open-ended and evolving. To state "this is fact for all time" denies all the historical examples of a statement like that later being proven false and closes the door on further, current examination.

  That's a problem to me.

  —jazztao Read jazztao's other letters
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