Thank you! My response is on Wooh's blog today!
I always enjoy reading your letters and notes.
We are at Schiphol Airport McD's because they provide free Internet!
In your philosophical enquiries, it is important to realise that the mathematics we use most often defines our perspective.
When scientists started using imaginary numbers their attitude to reality changed significantly. My father used music instead of mathematics and found that music told him of other realities, particularly that we are all like waves and occasionally harmony created unimaginable beauty. It is in the nature of waves that you will understand what you are and whether your signals and wave patterns allow you to behold beauty. Many of us can appreciate musical waves even though we cannot create harmonies ourselves. Since waves behave laws that are not restricted to time and space, it was easy for my father to realise that other worlds existed in which higher levels of harmony enriched those creations of these higher wave form worlds. He thought of such places as heaven and such places could be reached by working on those parts within you that are timeless matter less and infinitely eternal. Such waves exist, but it takes a master to see their value in everyday living.
As I write in my book, its all about the fine tuning and realising that one has to correct for imperfections in one's 'wave' reader!
Always good thoughts,
On 4 Jun 2013, at 05:49 AM, a reader wrote:
Hello RT,I found your letter/blog - the one which which stimulated my thoughts to a level causing me to wish to respond. It was in my email trash although clearly not the one I had planned to dispose of. This time, after accessing the New Zealand website for which you provided a link, I wrote down the words which had caught my eye and fortunately so because on my next try I found all of my "trashed" email had been permanently deleted.The particular statements to which I subscribe include the following: "Only religious fundamentalists have certitude. Their knowledge is a belief system that's immune to realworld experience and facts. Science is the method of critically testing competing theories. Successful theories are only ever tentative.""History deeply demonstrates that religions mixed with power and money readily survive long past their "use-by dates" (per Rodney Hyde).I tend also to subscribe to the statement by Steven King (the mystery writer) to the effect that he saw religion as an "elaborate afterlife insurance scam". (At the extreme, this has even gone as far as successful (in actual $sales) advertizing for a Place in Heaven. At the same time I hardly blame those who have devoted their lives and made livings from using religion for its best purposes - personally I and multi-millions have benefitted from such efforts. Unfortunately, traditional religion in just about any form has proven far too susceptible to more devious uses.At one time, after stepping up to agnosticism, I was unable to grasp how anyone could possibly claim with certainty the viewpoint of atheism (a view held and shared with me by Diane's sister Carol, whose position intially truly shocked me). However, I eventually came to recognise that, while there can be no certainty with respect to such matters (if not all matters of so-called fact), broadly accepted levels/terms of rational/logical argument require only the highest levels of certainty (not perfect certainty) to accept application of the word "certainty". To argue otherwise is simply to refute the whole point of iintelligent communication.The suggestion that the efforts of scientists now concerned with global warming are a form of religion because of the lack of certainty seems to be geared toward discounting these concerns as a basis for action. Personally, I see this as about as meaningful and helpful as discounting early efforts against the tobacco companies because their zeal could be compared to the historic zeal found within many religions (with even less scientific evidence than now available relative to global warming).
