WELL, AT LEAST WE'VE GOT THAT ONE

Blog number 472******** 11 January 2011

A few years back most of my time on the Internet was spent on message boards. I loved them. Then they started to change. I think it was because the message boards began to get inundated with younger people. Youngsters who seemed to believe that they had just discovered something brand new, unaware that the rest of us had already discovered that when we were that age.

Especially troublesome were those who had just discovered philosophy and immediately believed they now knew all the answers to everything. I just could not talk to these people.

One of the things I began to do, was whenever one of them gave as fact, his opinion -such as declaring that after we died, our conscious and our identity was gone forever, I would answer, "And we know that how?

One lad posted after a few weeks of my saying that almost every day with, "I wish you would stop saying that."

I answered that with, "I will stop saying that as soon as you stop stating your opinion as fact. You go first."

One of the most ironic and common statements was that the Theory of Evolution was proven fact. Even though it is stated as a theory in its very name! Good Brubaker!

And isn't every theory really an opinion with a fancier name?

I consider unconscious cultural conditioning as one of, if not the most, corrosive aspect of any civilization. Witches were burned because of it. Any wars started because of it? Oh yeah - every one.

And cultural conditioning starts by believing information that comes our way without our thinking very deeply, "And this person knows that how?"

What seems to stop this deep thinking from happening is laziness and bowing to authority.

So! I was very surprised and pleased to read in an article in this weeks The New Yorker in "The Talk of the Town" section, about a young woolly mammoth found in Russia.

The writer made the comment, "In fact, small mammoths were much desired by certain predators, such as the scimitar-toothed cat; in Texas (a display said), there is a cave in which thirty-two scimitar-toothed cat skulls have been found..."

Normally, the phrase "a display said" would not have been written. It would have been left out, giving the impression that a fact was being written instead of something that may or may not be true. The writer was saying in effect, "I don't know if this is true or not."

I just love the phrase, "I don't know" amongst authorities especially, but this is the first time I have ever ran across it with them. As far as I can remember.