Calculus, also belief, was Re: [UA] Crosswords and Blue Teets

[Nick Wedig]

>My experience with Catholics (including 2nd-generation fallen Catholics
>like myself -- we're all still Catholics, it gets into your DNA) is that
>they're all drawn to ritual, mysticism, and occult mumbo-jumbo. Probably
>_particularly_ ex-Catholics, in fact... we're nostalgic for the high
>ritual of a church we no longer feel comfortable participating in
>directly, so we get our occult fix somewhere else.

Makes a lot of sense to me.  As a kid, statues, stained glass windows, and singing kept me interested at church, but the religious bit became increasingly irritating as time went on.  Looking for ritual and metaphysics elsewhere would describe a lot of my actions, within and out of gaming.

>PS - Re: my beliefs. When asked, I usually go off about how I think that
>the use of the word "belief" for something any less definite than "I
>believe that my keys are in my pocket" is an abuse of language, and that
>it takes a folk-psychology concept and stretches it beyond recognition.

Have you seen "Dogma"? at the moment, I'm thinking of one of Chris Rock's monologues about how ideas are preferable to belief.  

I'm also thinking of the one quote in the UA book about how "Dying for an idea is to put a high price on speculation" which once got me in trouble when i posted in on a bulletin board in response to my boss's posting an MLK quote about how the only people worth dealing with are those willing to die for an ideal.

>If pressed, I describe myself as agnostic in the original Huxleyan sense
>(http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/sn-huxley.html) of skepticism with
>regard to the capacity for human understanding of the universe/God.

I myself have gotten to the point where, to quote RAWilson: "I believe nothing."  I have theories and ideas, but never doubt I could be wrong.

Mr. teapot
skeptic, in the philosophical sense of the word

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