From Epistemology to Extortion -- and Back

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FROM EPISTEMOLOGY TO EXTORTION -- AND BACK

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TODAY'S QUOTE:

"An important property of our sense experience, and, more generally, of all of our experience, is its time-like order."

-- Albert Einstein, from "Physics and Reality" (1936)

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Thursday
July 12, 2007

Dear Art,

Thanks for sharing your open letter concerning your impending retirement. I enjoyed reading it -- particularly the line near the end:
"I've been told the best thing about retirement is waking up and not having to go to work so I plan on doing that several times a day."

Thanks again to you and Nancy for having me. I found my visit to your home to be highly therapeutic and invigorating. Thanks too for the book-on-CD of Bill Bryson's THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID. I finally began listening to it this week, and you're right: it tastes good like a good-humored memoir should. Probably most importantly, listening to it is providing me with some valuable memory triggers. Even though Bryson is a bit younger than me and his family's prosperity level was considerably higher than my family's, enough of his experiences were similar to what mine were and enough of the backdrop for his childhood in Des Moines was similar to the backdrop for my own childhood in Wichita that the imagery, at least, is helping to bring back a flood of memories. Did it flood your mind with the same kind of nostalgia? Unlike Bryson, however, I'm still not quite sure of how I came to possess x-ray vision. And even though mine is
not nearly as spectacular as his, it nonetheless does come in mighty handy on a regular basis.

For instance, in my understanding of human affairs. I'm thinking specifically of the sorts of human affairs (interpersonal dynamics) I've touched on earlier this week vis-a-vis Richard Dawkins' THE GOD DELUSION and Sam Harris's THE END OF FAITH. Most folks in our current global social milieu will insist that they wish to be accepted for what they ARE. Which is usually not true at all. Most folks seem, instead, to wish to be "accepted" for what they THINK they are. Thus, those of us with x-ray vision, in seeing through other people (among other things), end up accepting them for what they ARE, rather than for what they THINK they are, the most immediate consequence of which is usually a very inconvenient MYTHOKLASM on both their part and ours.

In the process of "prewriting" my own memoir of growing up in Wichita in the 1950's & '60's, I think back to the billions and billions of minutes I spent sitting in church and Sunday School and choir practice and Methodist Youth Fellowship, etc. On each occasion, I'd be able to take things at face value for five or ten minutes, and then that darned x-ray vision would start to kick in and I'd be unable to NOT see things as they really were -- underneath and inside. Which brings us to why I've entitled this evening's open letter FROM EPISTEMOLOGY TO EXTORTION -- AND BACK. Like Dawkins, I'd ask myself epistemological questions about why the INDIVIDUALS around me "believed" (sic) as they did. But by the time I became a man, I was able to get both close enough and far away enough to realize that INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION IS EXTORTION. These days, I seem to have come full circle, asking myself lots of questions about THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF EXTORTION.
Which is how I came to incorporate the concept THE STOCKHOLM SYNDROME into my understanding of how "belief" really works. More, anon.

YOUR BROTHER IN X-RAY VISION,

Galen


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Our Founder Performing Mythoklastic Research (circa 1989)