[MD] Quantum Enigma

[david buchanan]

Adrie said:
Been thinking about this sentence, as quoted,"" Radical empiricism is a rejection of scientific objectivity AND religious Absolutism.""  Can i read and understand it like this proposal?, 'Radical empiricism contains the rejection of alleged scientific objectivity and religious absolutism, and ! absolutism 'an sich '? so to speak rejecting absolutism because it's projecting boundary's? can you decondense it a little bit?


dmb says:

I'm not sure what you're asking. Try this idea: religious absolutism and scientific objectivity have very different pictures of reality but they both assert that the truth is singular because there is just one reality and one right way to understand it. For a pragmatist, however, there are many truths and there is no single exclusive Truth. Also, as the pragmatist sees it, "god" and "matter" are both abstract concepts that have been mistaken for realities, mistaken as the "real" reality behind appearances. This error is called "reification".


Adrie said:

BTW , love the word partisan, its common use here , i'm surprised to see it in your language. My aunt was a partisan, btw, saved alive from a pile of dead body's  at Bergen-Belsen by American forces. She worked for the V5 resistanceforce, and was caught by the Germans. When they found her, her weight was 25 kilo/50 pounds? She lived 3 years in the camps, even in Treblinka, and Dora Mittelbau.


dmb says:
My use of the word "partisan" was not that specific, of course. I like to use the word because it not only expresses a one-sided loyalty to a cause or position but it also vaguely suggests that such points of view only see one "part" of the picture. So I use the word to mean both "biased" and "incomplete". The term "partial" works the same way. 

I like to think I would have been a partisan back in WW2. Sadly, at the time there were many NAZI sympathizers throughout the Western world. Right-wing politicians and conservative religious leaders looked upon Hitler with admiration. One example, from my home town... was "Father Coughlin" about whom Wiki says:


"After the 1936 election, Coughlin increasingly expressed sympathy for the fascist policies of Hitler and Mussolini as an antidote to Bolshevism.[18] His CBS radio broadcasts became suffused with antisemitic themes. He blamed the Depression on an "international conspiracy of Jewish bankers", and also claimed that Jewish bankers were behind the Russian Revolution. On November 27, 1938, he said "There can be no doubt that the Russian Revolution ... was launched and fomented by distinctively Jewish influence."

Social Justice on sale in a New York City street, 1939He began publication of a magazine, Social Justice, during this period. Coughlin claimed that Marxist atheism in Europe was a Jewish plot against America. The December 5, 1938 issue of Social Justice included an article by Coughlin which reportedly closely resembled a speech made by Joseph Goebbels on September 13, 1935 attacking Jews, atheists and communists, with some sections being copied verbatim by Coughlin from an English translation of the Goebbels speech. At a rally in the Bronx in 1938, he reportedly gave a Nazi salute and said, "When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing."[19] Coughlin did state "Nothing can be gained by linking ourselves with any organization which is engaged in agitating racial animosities or propagating racial hatreds." [20] Furthermore, in an interview with Edward Doherty of The Liberty magazine, Coughlin states:"My purpose is to help eradicate from the world its mania for persecution, to help align all good men. Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Gentile, Christian and non-Christian, in a battle to stamp out the ferocity, the barbarism and the hate of this bloody era. I want the good Jews with me, and I'm called a Jew baiter, an anti-Semite."[21]On November 20, 1938, two weeks after Kristallnacht, Coughlin, referring to the millions of Christians killed by the Russian Marxists, said "Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted."[22] After this speech, and as his programs became more antisemitic, some radio stations, including those in New York and Chicago, began refusing to air his speeches without pre-approved scripts; in New York, his programs were cancelled by WINS and WMCA, leaving Coughlin to broadcasting on the Newark part-time station WHBI. On December 18, 1938 two thousand of Coughlin's followers marched in New York protesting potential asylum law changes that would allow more Jews (including refugees from Hitler's persecution) into the U.S., chanting, "Send Jews back where they came from in leaky boats!" and "Wait until Hitler comes over here!" The protests continued for several months. Donald Warren, using information from the FBI and German government archives, has also argued that Coughlin received indirect funding from Nazi Germany during this period.[23]After 1936, Coughlin began supporting an organization called the Christian Front, which claimed him as an inspiration. In January 1940, a New York City unit of the Christian Front was raided by the FBI for plotting to overthrow the government. Coughlin had never been a member but his reputation suffered a fatal decline.[24]"