From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jul 11 2001 - 23:37:38 MDT
Samantha and Amara have defended spirituality, synchronicity,
and (I think) religiosity. I want to get down to the truth
of what's really going on here.
I had a friend over the course of a couple of decades who
did the same thing. Despite having some of the deepest
conversations of my life with him, I never did understand
why. Perhaps the answer will emerge in this medium. Perhaps
an answer will emerge if we try.
To me the questions are,
1. Why do some people gladly debunk what they see as clear
falsehoods where others, equally skeptical, don't want to?
2. Why do the latter embrace terms, e.g., "spirituality" and
"synchronicity" overwhelmingly used by people who mean
things completely different from them?
About the latter question, there is no shortage of words and
phrases in English to distinguish shades of belief. Articulate
people (which these people invariably are) could easily always
find suitable substitution phrases---but they didn't do so, and
mostly resist doing so. Why?
Now a semanticist might retort, "because the term in question
has so many favorable semantic links, that it's very useful
for the purposes of communication". But if this were the case,
then you'd see people who use terms like "God", "spirituality",
and "synchronicity" qualifying their remarks. In other words,
the terms would always be followed by words like "in the sense
of...", or "-like", or surrounded by scare-quotes. But it
doesn't happen. Why? (Apologies to Samantha here: she has
made it clear that she does have a lot of beliefs that are
pretty far away from materialism---beliefs not supported by
any scientific theories.)
So can anyone explain what is going on?
Lee
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