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Re: Trainspotting
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I had a conversation once with a woman who was a firm believer in numerology. I listened for some time as she told me how to compute my "number" from the letters of my name, by adding the indiviual digits together. There's more to it than just that, but listening to her it occurred to me that the entire system was built around the fact that we use base 10 for our numbering system.

So I said to her, "Would numerology still be valid if we only had 8 fingers and thumbs?". At first she didn't understand what I was getting at, but I showed her a few worked examples. My name in base 8 generated an entirely different number than it did in base 10 and so did hers. To me it seemed such an obvious contradiction of the whole basis of numerology, but she became very defensive (as I thought she might) and told me that numerology didn't have to follow the rules of mathematics and then refused to discuss the matter further.

This is where I have a problem with those kind of belief systems. They appear to be based on arbitrary or spurious factors that don't stand up to scrutiny. It's not that I require absolute proof. I don't even mind if something can't be proven, but when it fails even the most basic tests of rationality, then it falls into the category of blind faith.

I don't regard having an analytical approach to things is in any way limiting my experiences. All the emotional experiences that others have presented in this thread are ones that I can identify with. I have a thirst for knowledge that embraces the rational, the emotional and the spiritual.

Someone might read a poem and think how beautiful it is, but have no idea about poetic form or structure. Does that mean that a student of literature who does understand these things appreciates the beauty of the poem any less? I think the reverse is more likely to be true.

Understanding the world better does not diminish the awe at the wonder of it all. The more we seek to know, the more we find to know. Blind faith, however, believes what it will despite what the world shows to the contrary.

Faith is the outward manifestation of the closed mind.


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Steve Gray
Posted by Steve Gray
24th September 2003ce
23:24

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Re: Trainspotting (FourWinds)

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Re: Trainspotting (morfe)

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