I’m a little slow on the uptake. I have followed DK for years, but never figured out I could actually “contribute” other than by making comments. Thanks to TrueBlueMajority for the DKtionary, wherein I figured out I could actually look at something called “MY PROFILE”. I’m new at this stuff — blogging and all — but I do have a take on what is going on in our world. I will only know if that take has any enduring value (other than for myself) if I put my notions out for review and comment.
One of the things that takes up a lot of my thinking is the notion of TRUTH and how we discover it. I must admit that I have a very decided perspective on the matter. I am (or was) a scientist and an engineer, and I have a great deal of interest in the world around me. I am absolutely in awe of the universe, and in serious disgust at some members of the human species. I recognize the cockroach as my brother in that we are both made of stardust and are a part of the universe becoming conscious of itself. Nonetheless, when that brother crosses my living room floor without permission, he gets returned to his elemental (or more correctly, his molecular) form.
Back to TRUTH. In the late 1960s (while I was in high school), I ran onto a “quotable quote” in a Reader’s Digest that went something like this: “It took from the dawn of humanity to the ____teenth century for one man to have the intellectual courage to say that questions of truth are determined by experiment and not by authority.” I don’t recall if the ____ in the original was the fifteenth, sixteenth or even the seventeenth century, and so, I don’t know to whom the original quote was referring. (Given that I can’t recall the exact quote, I would appreciate any help from the broader world in tracking this down.) If the person lived in the fifteenth century, my candidates are Leonardo da Vinci or more likely, Nicolaus Copernicus. If in the sixteenth, it could be Galileo, Brahe, or Keppler. If the seventeenth, it could again be Galileo or Keppler, but a new idea has been dawning that it also could be Descartes, or even more likely, Spinoza.
I’m leaning towards Spinoza for several reasons. Of all the others mentioned, he was the one who actually and successfully stood up to religious authorities. His ideas about the natural world, although uninformed about things we have learned in physics, made his work the foundation on which our founding fathers eventually built the US Constitution. He was among the earliest to recognize the equality of all men (I don’t yet know if he was able to recognize women as equal to men, and I don’t know his thoughts about other races or sexual orientations, etc.). But he was among the earliest persons to visibly and vocally challenge the right of kings and popes to rule the people. Quite a milestone in my thinking.
In the context of freedom of thought, we have a substantial portion of our population that rejects objective reality in favor of revelation as the source of truth. It is time that we confront this relic and root it out of our society and our consciousness.
More later. Keep safe.