[ExI] Changing Other Poster's Minds

[Lee Corbin]

Samantha writes

> spike wrote:
>
>> After thinking about this for years, long after realizing that the religion
>> I knew was not true, I finally realized that it matters to me if my religion
>> is true.  I love true things.  Religion should be treated as any scientific
>> theory.  In that sense, altho I am now an atheist, I still have the
>> fundamentalist's outlook, ja?
> 
> hahaha.  Not in the least.  I would need to assume that the people that 
> look at religion as really "philosophy" and that it would seem also 
> assume that philosophy is not really philosophy and doesn't really 
> require a love of truth and search for it but is more some rather murky 
> "philosophy of life" are in fact the correct and most mature and "right" 
> ones.  But this is again as assumption of right vs. wrong and  even true 
> view versus false so this is no escape from your assumed position that 
> to care about truth is to be a fundamentalist.    I wish that 
> fundamentalists cared about the truth.

In a sense, I agree with you.  But the more *fundamental* (pardon the
pun) issue here is about the nature of truth.  Spike is targeting relativists,
and in my book they need to be overcome at a different level "before"
we take on those who agree with us that there is just one truth.

> I do not believe  that the majority of them do at all.   They care only to
> assert that they have the only Truth while not needing to understand
> or inquire at all.  This is not at all the same thing.   But I am very sure
> you know that.

Yes, I am sure that Spike does too.  But it's just a difference in our
methodology towards truth.  They consult sacred works; we criticize
and conjecture and refutation.  'Tis true, our more fundamentalist
battle seems won, but I am dismayed from time to time to see
relativism pop up here and on SL4.  "Oh yes I believe in God",
says what you and I know to be an atheist, etc.

See, on that page, the fundamentalists and we are on the same page.

Lee