Religious belief

[Unorthodox]

I was always fairly targeted with my encyclopedia looking, but since we spent most summer days at least 3 hours at the library, I had the whole reference section to browse whatever struck my fancy rather than just the encyclopedia. 

I remember the summer I decided to build a castle and had about every book on how it was done...

Dad made me stop about a month into it.  I don't think he figured I'd stick with it like I did. 

We turned my wall into an aqueduct, though, which still stands today (admittedly reinforced and hidden since to better serve as aqueduct) and no basement flooding since. 

[Buster's Uncle]

...I have an idea for a backyard castle that I think would be feasible and practical to do...

[Unorthodox]

I strongly recommend new methods, not the dry stone method I was using. 

For speed if nothing else. 

[Buster's Uncle]

A cinderblock keep w/ some stucco-ish stone dressing could be made to look super-cool, be a lot of fun for kids, and double as a shed.  Two floors and a sunroof..

[Valka]

Maybe plant some blue flowers around it to give the illusion of a moat?

[Buster's Uncle]

A moat would be problematic for kids playing, as would a flowerbed, but you're definitely thinking in the right direction.

This is something I probably would have done 20 years ago if I had my own yard I could call the shots about, and -I dunno- a thousand or so dollars to spend on do it yourself masonry...


Somebody needs to mention a spiritual matter soon..

[Valka]

I wasn't thinking of anything elaborate. Maybe some blue delphiniums or bluebells. I know that a real moat would be too much bother, and depending on the rainfall there, it would either flood or be a standing body of water that would attract mosquitoes.

[Rusty Edge]

A moat would be problematic for kids playing, as would a flowerbed, but you're definitely thinking in the right direction.

This is something I probably would have done 20 years ago if I had my own yard I could call the shots about, and -I dunno- a thousand or so dollars to spend on do it yourself masonry...


Somebody needs to mention a spiritual matter soon..

Would the castle have a chapel area or a cross-shaped archer's slit?

[Buster's Uncle]

You could use the second floor as a chapel, according to my plan -the ground floor tending to be full of lawn mowers and rakes- I'd definitely thought about arrow slits.

You'll recall much earlier in the thread, me talking about employing Christian iconography in my renfair work - buncha neopagans, rennies are, and couldn't be bothered with that basic point of accuracy...

[Rusty Edge]

I'd say that beebalm would make a nice low maintenance moat, but the trouble with beebalm is that it attracts bees.

[Buster's Uncle]

-Momma said something I liked coming back from voting - that she's not wild about the socialism thing with Bernie, but it's just Christian for people to look out for each other.

Why don't you ever hear that from church people 'voting their principals'?

She's a nice church lady, not real, what you'd call liberal, but really put out by the bad-mouthing and hate politics on the right - all the way back to Reagan.  She looks at Christ's teaching and sees the love they neighbor and turn the other cheek - and she finds it deeply troubling that Franklin Graham has his head on straight with the charitable activities, but spinning around in mid-air shooting fire when he talks politics...

She was complaining yesterday morning about how people confuse their culture with things that aren't actually in their religion - and there's sure a lot of that going around everywhere, fouling politics and actively undermining the religion.

[Buster's Uncle]

On to epistemology!

Many moons ago, I subbed "methods of knowledge" class (basically critical thinking skills for AP high schoolers).  We watched a video on the Mayans, and at the end the students laughed at the bizarre notion that the survival of the universe depended on people ramming thorns through their genitals to give the gods blood to drink.  I didn't have time to smack them properly for that before the bell rang: "how often do you seriously stop to question received wisdom about the basic truths of the world"?

So, let's ask each other.  I simply take heliocentrism on trust, but it probably doesn't matter whether I believe it or not.  Ditto atomic theory, photosynthesis, etc.  Those all come down to "why would anyone make this crap up?"  Then there's climate change and economics questions.  Both involve systems so phenomenally complicated that I have doubts of my ability to properly understand the big picture even if I troubled to read into either.  I wind up assuming climate change is true because there's no credible profit in making it up, and have some suspicions regarding economists who consistently argue in favor of things that make it easier for rich people to accumulate power and influence.  But for all I know, it's t'other way around.

What's your rule of thumb?

For one thing, don't take heliocentrism on trust.  It's been discredited for hundreds of years.

If I follow the question, my "it don't matter" answer to predestination and solipsism applies to a lot of this.  I don't understand economics that well either, but still think Keynes was -not so much wrong as- dangerous.  (Government can do a lot for an economy pumping capital into the system at the right times, but Ross Perot had a point, too.)

Any intelligent person has to assess the reliability of their information sources -could my eyes/senses have been fooled, are my observations statistically significant, does this guy even know what he's talking about, do I trust this guy's word, does his internal logic scan, do I accept the base assumptions, and so on- and assemble their own working model of the world to function in it.  Mom and Dad did a lot of the groundwork providing me with an ad-hoc consensus reality and values, of course, and beginning in adolescence, of course, I began challenging their model and tinkering it around into my own version - which I'm still working on, of course, just like everyone else (though I'd venture us nerds have to work harder at it for longer, being less plugged into the larger consensus reality of society around us by our very nature).

I buy into global warming mostly because the logic scans -though I have to accept base assumptions to that logic to do with how greenhouse gasses work, because I don't have the science to understand WHY carbon dioxide retains solar heat- and the measurements of the phenomenon in progress seem to match up.  Arguments that there's an agenda imagining it or lying about it strike me as saying a lot more about the people who think that way than the people they attack - it's political, and please go sell your bill of goods somewhere else that doesn't foul your own nest and mine, fools.

So, logic and a knowledge I can't have complete knowledge, and thus have to muddle through partly on faith and assumptions.  Does that answer the question well enough?

Mom and Dad did a lot of the groundwork providing me with an ad-hoc consensus reality and values, of course, and beginning in adolescence, of course, I began challenging their model and tinkering it around into my own version - which I'm still working on, of course, just like everyone else (though I'd venture us nerds have to work harder at it for longer, being less plugged into the larger consensus reality of society around us by our very nature).

On the last parenthetical bit, a few more remarks because of who's in the room and how that informs our approach to modeling the world and forming our belief sets.

We replaced the light fixture in the kitchen yesterday, and I'm still wincing every time I go in there, especially after dark.  It had been a soft florescent light since we moved in 46 years and three days ago (note that precision, for which I had actually looked at the date and counted before I realized how it underlined part of my point) and the incandescent lighting changes the color of the light and everything and makes the shadows sharp and looks glare-y and that makes me unhappy.  -Kinda DEEPLY unhappy.  I had a horrible fight a while back over the bathroom remodeling and I'm. still. too. pissed. for that to be a safe subject to talk about around the house.

Many/most of you already see where I'm going with this part.  I watch Monk and Big Bang Theory and nitpick their accuracy.  Lori once posted a drawing of a 20-sided die, and somehow whether the numbers were arranged right came up and I posted a joking scold for putting up an OCD trigger like that.  And then I really got up and looked around the house for an analog one to check, and googled pictures when I couldn't find one.  I have a preference for which side of my cigarette pack is up when I lay it down.  I get furious when my coffee spoon is missing in the morning.  I alternate red and black stacks to the best of my ability when playing solitaire.

-I've never been diagnosed, but yeah, I'm definitely a bit on that autism/OCD spectrum somewhere.  Mostly I can turn it on and off when I really want to -and my women have come to sometimes ask me to nitpick things for them- so it's not a burden, exactly, but -- any difference that doesn't tend to make you alpha male is probably a social burden, and I am mentally more than a bit other.  You know; most of us have at least a touch, for it's a major part of what makes us nerds.

And I worked out long ago that pretty central to the definition of nerd is no (or little, really) sense of perspective.  It is typical of nerds to hyperfocus on their interests and resist (irrationally, according to outsiders) variation.  I'm picky about what I'll call Star Trek without qualifiers and hate it when others are careless about the distinction.  Vishniac keeps trying to pick fights with me for vocally disliking the derivative he likes.  We're nerds.  And the world laughs at us for caring when they see it.

But you know?  We're doing what everyone does - evaluating input and deciding our reaction and modeling the universe according to our individual druthers.  Yet, my sister still tells about how I looked at the "Are you a Nerd?" poster that was in circulation ca 30 years ago and pointing out stuff it missed.  And she laughs and laughs, my sister who wrote a book about a Victorian actress/playwright none of you ever heard of unless you heard from me (we host her website on the subject).  My 54 year-old sister, who pulls the hair out of Barbie dolls and sews in new hair, laughs at my pedantry.  And I laugh, too.

You gotta work on having that sense of perspective about the truly important things, if it don't come naturally.

And I don't really have a point here, aside from pointing out that being that way profoundly affects how you process reality (and how I react to finding the living room furniture moved around).  (And I understand is fundamental to how autism works - poor ability to filter out 'useless' sensory input.)  I'm sure sure that some of those monks doing science long ago, or meticulously illuminating manuscripts, or whatever painstaking monkish things they did, would tend to get what I'm talking about, if not the greater meaning of it - nerds are usually bad at the big picture, having such affinity for the details...

(Now to try to catch all my typos before 15 minutes have passed and it puts an edit notice on the post; I hate those.)

So Elok - I daresay I answered the heck out of the question; any response before we lose you for 40 days come tonight?

[Valka]

For one thing, don't take heliocentrism on trust.  It's been discredited for hundreds of years.

WHAT?!

I admit I haven't read part of this thread, but please tell me that this is a typo, or that I've missed a crucial part of the conversation that clarifies things.

Heliocentrism = Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun. That's how the solar system works (well, okay, everything revolves around a common center of gravity, but because the Sun is so huge, that location happens to be inside the Sun). Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus provided evidence to support it, and we've progressed to the point where we've been able to take a picture of the solar system and can see that the Sun is not orbiting the Earth.

[Buster's Uncle]

It puts the Sun at the center of the universe, which is ridiculous on the face of it, and long proven to be in gross error.

Hopefully Lori will, hopefully, amplify on that from his considerable formal training in the science...

[Valka]

Okay, thanks for the clarification. I just came from demo'ing a game where the Sun and Moon were called "planets" so I'm in a bit of a temper about stuff like this at the moment.