[MD] Humanism

[david buchanan]

Arlo said to mark:
Quotes provide a good way to cover the same ground without needing to reinvent the wheel each and every time. In the case of citing an encyclopedia, it can provide a common, shared frame of reference for the dialogue. ... My guess is DMB saw a rhetorical trap and dismissed it by offering instead a quote showing a broader context.

dmb says:
Thanks Arlo but I wasn't trying to avoid any traps. I was just trying to answer the question about the MOQ's relation to Humanism and I thought that the three quotes (two from Wiki's article on Humanism and one from ZAMM) were clear enough all by themselves. The answer seemed so clear and obvious that the quotes did need any help from me. 

Arlo said:
Like Marsha, I think you're bending over backwards to come up with something... anything... to attack DMB over. Personally, I don't know why he be bothers, he could say "the weather is nice today"  and he'd be attacked for pretending to be a weatherman, and heaven forbid he quote information from weather.com to show how sunny it is where he lives.

dmb says:
Yep. I literally contributed one single word to that post. "See?" was all I said and yet it drew two bitter attacks. But that's not really the problem. What the reader was supposed to "see" is simply that the MOQ is a kind of Humanism. Sadly, both attackers seemed completely unaware of the only point I was making and their attacks had nothing to do with Humanism. 


Mark said:
And please do not bring blasphemy or sacrilege into this, such a thing is not becoming.  Are we not to question and analyze what Pirsig states.  We are not disciples are we?


dmb says:
Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Liverpool and delivered a paper called "Fun With Blasphemy"? Pirsig seemed to like it quite a bit. It's still up on Ant's website, if you're interested. And yea, I kinda am a disciple, although one that thinks blasphemy is fun.   


Arlo said:
"Humanism" is  ..being set up as just another bugbear in the boogeyman soup. But if you want to discuss this, let's see if we can at least begin with an understanding of what is meant by "Humanism". I've just read over the Wikipedia entry, please do the same and let me know if you think this is an acceptable "definition" of the term. 



dmb says:
Right. Wiki is a good place to start for those who need to quickly discover the most basic idea. In this case, it seemed that the most basic description of "Humanism" was very much needed. Somebody asked so I answered. 

I do and I do and I do for you kids, and this is thanks I get?  If Marsha or Mark learned anything about the MOQ or Humanism, then they have my sincerest apologies. I don't know what I was thinking. Obviously this is a wildly inappropriate place to answer any questions about the MOQ. I'm also deeply ashamed for using Wiki because their articles are all written by commie demons from hell. And the Stanford encyclopedia is controlled by Satan himself. In fact, anything intellectual really should be off limits here, eh?