Hi,
KMO <kmo@c-realm.com> wrote:
<<
I apologize in advance if this seems picky,
>>
<<
If you have made a tentative judgement that the dark side of faith is
more destructive than the dark side of reason, and if making a tentive
judgement is to be distinct from simply reporting your
expectation-filtered perceptions, then it seems to me as though we
should expect you to be able to give an account of how you selected
your examples of the dark side of faith to compare to your sample
cases of the dark side of reason without allowing your preconcetions
to introduce a bias in the example-selection process.
Can you give such an account?
>>
To be honest, I ripped that last post off and never considered the word ("estimation") to be unusual[1]. However, you are right that it's probably just a personal feeling (or "bias") of mine, based on my (fragmentary) understading of the history and psychology of the Christian religion. Not to iterate the point too strongly, but there are quite a few really ugly events that were (and are) driven, at least partially, by that groups *dogmatic* (faithful) adherence to the Bible and the Pope. And, of course, there are many psychologists who have concluded we would be better off without that religion.
For the flip side (the dark side of reason), I suppose one could maintain that an entire category of suicides are caused, although if you want to get *serious* in your analysis, I think Reed has been propounding that it is the *dogmatic* (faithful) adherence to reason at all costs which is the ultimate cause. If one *really* wants to stretch the evils of reason, you could try to blame the atomic bomb on it, but I think everyone here sees that such a position is tenuous at best. Given my bias, I'm probably missing something -- do you have any good examples of the dark side of reason?
ERiC
[1] For those who can remember, a theory was advanced on this list about a year and a half ago that the words we use are related to the words we hear (that, in fact, meme's act on the level of individual words, replacing your vocabulary from amoungst the vast selection that english has to offer). I have heard "estimation" literally hundreds of times in the last two months in my statistics course.