Where is balance Academic priorities 251

Roland, et al,

I don't agree. Presently accepted "logic" is missing some *BIG* pieces, like more is missing than is now there. The two that instantly come to mind:

1. Reverse reductio ad absurdum. If presented with two reasonable but incongrous arguments, there MUST be at least one false underlying buttumption. This shows the insanity of nearly all political arguments. However, NO ONE demands discussion of the requisite false underlying buttumptions because that would trample on religious interests, which such arguments usually show to be illogical-insane. There is even a clear statement in the Bible disparaging logic! That conventional logic fails to stumble on this certainly shows the COMPLETE breakdown of conventional logical methods in the real world. In short, your belief here has short-circuited your ability to see how really screwed up the world is.

2. A while back I ran a contest among the kids and most people I knew, to propose the hypothetical worst evil imaginable. I allowed combining efforts, "stealing" ideas from each other, etc. The grand winner after several weeks was "any religious belief with many valuable and self-evident truths, but with subtle flaws guaranteed to ruin both the lives of its believers as well as the rest of the world". Far worse even than the holocaust, this would kill billions-trillions of people for millenia perhaps without end. Of course, this is indistinguishable from several religions including Christianity. While people now reject burning witches and other things as obvious flaws in the Bible, many people STILL accept the Bible as perfect and promote obviously destructive actions like supporting Israel in the Middle East. Then, we started asking ministers to either find any flaw in this or to propose an even worse evil. So for, no one has been able to either show a flaw or propose an even worse evil, but retreat to an apparent belief that we are just testing their blind faith.

The bottom line here is that I believe that my kid's logical abilities probably exceed your own. This is NOT meant to be any sort of slam against you, as you almost certainly had a good but sadly conventional bottom-up education which put you at a considerable disadvantage in this comparison. I only learned these things as I sought to answer some very pointed questions posed by my kids. Amazingly, conventional educations have blinded an entire world to such issues, but we should not be surprised because any emergence of such ideas would have been quashed by religious interests. This level of education in logic is now ONLY available in a home schooled setting.

Steve Richfie1d