“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Ludwig Wittgenstein We are suffering greatly because too many people are incapable of saying “I don’t know.” Why can’t people simply say “I don’t know” when they don’t know? Is it because so many of us were chastised in school when…
In an earlier post, I summarized an Elliot Aronson interview on the topic of cognitive dissonance. Because I find this to be such a critically compelling topic, I took the time to listen to a recent Point of Inquiry podcast featuring Dr. Carol Tavris, Aronson's co-author regarding Mistakes Were Made…
When developing buildings or ideas, it is critical to start with a good solid foundation. In fact, when people fail to build with a solid foundation, is usually not even worth one's while to correct the work. It's best to trash the entire project and start over with a worthy foundation. When it comes to ideas, there are three intellectual foundations that become indispensable. These three foundational ideas were set forth in the opening words of Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999):
Based upon evidence proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (and numerous other cognitive scientists), the battle over these ideas is utterly over. To argue otherwise is, in fact, to argue foolishly. Yet, for many, these three principles have not soaked in. There is constant deep resistance to these ideas among many of the people who present themselves as today's premier philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, theologians, teachers, and political leaders. As to why these ideas are so often ignored, there could be many potential explanations. I suspect that many people fear each of these principles because they suggest that we humans lack complete power and control over our lives. That thought makes all of us uncomfortable, of course, though a few of us are willing to take our harsh medicine to heart. Most people, however, are not willing to re-conceptualize traditional accounts of what it means to be human. They are not willing to dispense with a believe that each of us has an ethereal soul that is "free" to think any thought, a soul that is unencumbered by our clunky, fallible, poop and saliva-laden bodies. They like to believe that our conscious thoughts fully capture the full importance of every moment and every drop of sentience and proto-sentience. They prefer to believe that when it comes to words, Humpty Dumpty correctly declared: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less." They want to believe that humans have the power to speak forcefully without first having to develop a coherent theory of language, as though words serve as infallible conduits for transporting our purified ideas from here to there. [more . . . ]
- The mind is inherently embodied.
- Thought is mostly unconscious.
- Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
Freethinkers, in their attempts to cast light on culture’s many logical foibles, can lose focus. Like the more traditional naysayers, who bemoan our times while looking foggily to those good-old-days that never existed, liberal critical thinkers can come to a similarly deluded doom-and-gloom conclusion. Of course, the evidence used by…
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, is a runaway bestseller. Dawkins is a relentless one-man religion wrecking-crew. He carries a sharp knife for the many arguments that religions are somehow useful or worthy.
But isn’t religion sometimes good? Doesn’t religion sometimes heal the sick and feed the poor? When it comes time to complement religion, Dawkins tends to give only backhanded complements. When people are good, they are not really good because of religion. To the argument that religion makes people happy, Dawkins cites George Bernard Shaw’s words: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” (Page 167). Indeed, Dawkins really doubts whether religion is worthwhile at all:
It is hard to believe, for example, that health is improved by the semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence. . . . . the American comedian Kathy Ladman observes that “All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.”
When it comes time to applying evolutionary theory to religion, Dawkins doubts that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. He suspects religion is only a wretched byproduct of evolution.
…Moths fly into the candle flame, and it doesn’t look like an accident. They go out of their way to make a burnt offering of themselves. We could label it “self immolation behavior” and, under
