"the concern for the welfare of others, the need to be treated with
respect, and the need to be welcomed in a culture - are all things my
people share with yours." - Karla McLaren,
I feel that this is the essence of the Unification Movement - which
finds itself firmly in both camps: the metaphysical, because
Unificationists espouse a belief in God and the afterlife and the
skeptical, because Unificationism declares itself as refusing to be tied
to "blind faith".
I'm a software engineer, and my boss relies on me to be "skeptical" when
testing other people's programs. "Billy said it works? Well, I'll
believe that when I see it." Then Billy refuses to believe that it
DOESN'T work, unless I can reproduce the error right in front of his
eyes - and he still won't be fully convinced until he himself can make
it fail.
My personal question is whether any faith can stand the scrutiny of
critical thinking. And my answer is yes, but that makes me a rare bird
indeed. Even people in my church think I'm a bit kooky for being so
hard-headed.
My work at Wikipedia has often involved what McLaren called speaking to
people in in their own language: she said, "If we want to successfully
communicate with someone, we've got to understand not just their
language, but the cultural context from which their language springs.
From what I've seen in both the New Age and the
skeptical cultures, this
understanding is absent."
I'm Wikipedia's best Mediator (or have been so far - I have high hopes
for RedWolf's new crew) because I'm really good at translating one
"language" to another - not German to French of course, but the context
of assumptions (or "baggage"). How else could a man in a "cult" gain
the
trust of a bunch of atheists? Jimbo gave me root access to the server,
the Cunctator nominated me for Admin, people are constantly coming to my
user talk page asking me to mediate their article disputes - and I don't
mean how to format the Simpsons' infobox, I mean the real hard stuff.
Oh, well, I'm just rambling. I didn't have anything in particular to
say. Sorry I wasted your time, I just thought David Gerard picked an
interesting web link and thought I'd throw out a few comments:
http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-05/new-age.html
Uncle Ed