Rendering unto Caesar: The Terrorism of Superstition

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

There are people who contend that politics and superstition should be separated. Certainly, the world would be a better place if superstitious people simply went about their own personal affairs and stopped meddling in the private lives of their neighbors, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. The superstitious are terrified that if they don't terrorize their neighbors, they will suffer for eternity.

Some will argue that the Constitution guarantees the right of people to be superstitious, but that's no reason to appease their superstitions. It is one thing for the superstitious to terrorize their own children and quite a different matter for them to terrorize their neighbors. They even go so far as having their children terrorize the neighbor kids. This kind of conduct is vicious and brutal.

Superstition belongs to Caesar. It enslaves an entire population in a mental prison of fear and ignorance. People who reject superstition cannot ignore the cruelty of the superstitious.

What do you do to shelter your loved ones from the rabid terrorism of superstition?

Comments

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

Your suspicion is incorrect.
But, to show my open-ness:

What book/page would you recommend I investigate to see just how sagacious your argument is?

I mean, I'm also welcoming you to explain how the incompleteness of a logical system [albeit in a consistent system] alters the truth of
"3+3=6" is a tautological truth that is necessarily true once we define the symbols involved.

I mean, 3+3=6 is just as tautological as a bachelor is an unmarried male human. It's not terribly interesting, but it's tautologically true.

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

"I mean, 3+3=6 is just as tautological as a bachelor is an unmarried male human. It's not terribly interesting, but it's tautologically true."

No.

If mathematical judgments were strictly tautological there would be no such thing as mathematical knowledge let alone mathematical discovery. Evidently there is such a thing as mathematical knowledge and mathematical discovery, then mathematical judgments are not strictly tautological.

The question is how are mathematical concepts determined so as to constitute valid concepts which can be used in valid judgments. If mathematical judgments were strictly tautological, the answer would be: mathematical concepts are not determined, they don't constitute knowledge, and a mathematical signifier like '2' or '+' is just an arbitrary visual symbol to be arbitrarily determined, and the fact that we arbitrarily determine them into tautologies doesn't, and indeed can't, constitute any act of knowing. This is of course nonsense, as we have seen. So people think up better answers, like the one that has already been given, that mathematical concepts are determined through sensible intuition of quantity. Yay empiricism. Other people suggest that mathematical concepts are determined through our intellectual intuition of ideas of quantity. Yay rationalism. I hear these two schools get in a big fight and some German comes along to mediate.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I think you put Descartes before the whores.