Scientific wisdom

 






Are there really any tests for a theory of wisdom?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Public Cooperation Is Not One Church of Thought.

There are fundamentalists who claim they are the only Christians and that the Constitution mandate against the establishment of a church only bars the government from controlling their churches. They insist that the government is obligated to abide by the church law of their own sect whichever one it is. Actually, the ban against an established church has precedent in the intertwining of church and state in the history of Europe during the middle ages. Every facet of life was controlled either by the church or the state, and one enforced the authority of the other. There was no room for independent thought. So when pagan knowledge was brought back from the Middle East by the Crusaders, there was a Renaissance of thinking and culture that allowed people to question everything about life. The king's religion was continued through the Protestant Revolution, but the Enlightenment that came with the Renaissance still separated peoples' religious thought from their secular though...
Read more

All good things come to an end. Enjoy life while it lasts.

For thinking person, life needs meaning. How do we find that meaning. We look to things we do and to people, places and things we know. We also consider what we want to live for. It may be anything, but as we get older, there is less and less that we can do, and while places and things may remain as they were before, people die or go away. Living creatures do fear death. Maybe other animals do not have the capacity to conceptualize death the way humans can, but they still fear predators that can kill them. Other animals may not understand that merely living a long time will kill them, but humans do. So what do we do with this fear? Mostly we put it off or avoid thinking about it. People also find belief in elaborate supernatural schemes whereby they postulate something about their consciousness surviving the body dying. I am not sure why they fan their fears so much to be able to contemplate these fanciful post mortum expectations all the time. If these beliefs comfort them, then s...
Read more

The Divine used as an excuse.

I find the Divine to be a poor excuse for demanding what anyone should agree to. If you have to force your beliefs on someone else, how do you know they really believe what you say? In ancient times, it was enough for the tyrant to declare how the Divine favored his (or her) regime. It really didn't matter to the poor guy at the bottom of the ladder what the monarch said. Life was not any better for believing it. It was only blasphemy against the tyrant that got anyone into trouble since the tyrant was always the Son of the Divine. It is not only in North Korea that the tyrant was considered God. Even the Roman Emperors were considered Gods which is the reason for the Greek word "blasphemy" was used in the Christian Gospel for the Sanhedrin deciding that Jesus committed blasphemy. They weren't saying that he declared himself their God. They were saying that he had declared himself a God equal to the Roman Emperor. The Western term God is derived from...
Read more