Let me first establish my --- well lets call it non trivialness
Orwells Boot
Enter the two words orwells boot into any search engine. The item(s)
that come up under the names factotum666 or dnusbaum.com, usually first or second, are mine. If you think that those words are special, then use either orwell or boot, and almost any combination of: obedience, tyranny, government, authority. My article will be either 1st or 2nd.
I would like to do something with the popularity of this 6000 word article, either by way of talks / speeches or working on expanding the ideas in the article. I am currently doing that at
http://xfoolnature.org/?p=10[name and contact information removed]
Now if you go to my xfoolnature article I discuss possible god, and his possible nature. Sort of like spinoza did. As I say in my article, personally I am an agnostic about anything that I can not directly sense (the piraha people) or measure. However, I do have an interesting few paragraphs on gods nature, if god exists, and present a cogent argument that if he does exist than his representatives on earth are scientists, with the college of cardinals equivalent to mathematicians and physicists.
If people are going to believe in some sort of god, and it seems that many are, then at least they can believe in one whose earthly representatives are mostly agnostic or atheists, and do not try and kill or control each other :-)
Go to Part I foundations. You might wait a few days until the newest version, on which I am now working, is up. But the current version is good enough
These are, sort of, my conclusions
* The world exists
* Any work in which man has had a hand is likely to contain errors
* If there is a god, then the world is his work
* What makes humans unique is their abilities to investigate the world and construct testable intellectual models of it. This is known as science. The uniqueness of humans does not come from any morality that sets us apart from the other animals since most social animals have a morality very similar to ours. What sets us apart are the following: Humans can use fire and can read — that is process abstract symbols. These two abilities underly our greatest ability, a creation that could be credited to Issac Newton and his contemporaries, and that is science. If we are, indeed, created in the image of god, than that would mean that our unique brain is in his image.
* If we are to know god it will be by studying his works directly, that is the physical world, not books which are, after all, the works of men who are fallible.
